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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

I can't tell if this article was the original or if H3H3's video was the original, but H3H3 also covers this -

TL;DW - Youtubers with large young audiences are promoting loot box style gambling.

Youtube seems like the wild west.

On the dark side we have channels bursting with (possibly) human trafficked vietnamese women producing sexual content masquerading as slice-of-life, huge youtubers promoting gambling to children, elsagate, etc.

On the light side we have people's videos being flagged for copyright violations over literal sounds of nature, music they produced themselves, or music playing in the background. Also "fair use" doesn't exist on YouTube - a 1 second clip is enough for a company to claim your video apparently.

There are still a lot of niche channels I love on YouTube but I would never want to try to make a living producing content on that platform myself... seems too volatile.

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>Youtube seems like the wild west.

YT to me is more like Kowloon Walled City - massive and amazing as a monolithic entity, and you can find amazing gems - but when you look closely, its a lawless cess-pool with a confusing and almost evil method of getting around - and things that shouldn't be anywhere near each-other are practically roommates, rather than neighbors. And you should not trust any strangers you come across, no matter what they promise you. Also, its a terrible place for children to be unattended - and is largely ungoverned by those who should be governing it...

H3H3 is just as guilty of this. They were one of MANY channels advertising a scam "therapy" service called Better Help to viewers with mental health issues. While he did acknowledge it, it was only after being called out in a Pewdiepie video, and he seemed much more upset about getting caught than promoting such a scam of a service.

What's scammy about Better Help?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXUEnagP69c

This happened a while ago so I don't remember everything, but I believe the company was like an Uber for therapy, rather than providing therapy directly.

A few months ago Pewdiepie posted a video[0] that roughly took the piss out of Better Help and their practices and pointed out the irony of an online counseling service that claims to be a cheaper alternative to actual therapy, but still lists in their terms of service that you need actual therapy and that what they offer is only supplemental in nature.

So basically they're engaging in borderline false advertising targeted at people who are by definition emotionally and psychologically vulnerable and compromised.

And the youtube side of it is that a whole host of youtubers promoted this service on their platforms.

Not to mention that their terms dictate they can sell your data. Which obviously is unexpected from a“medical” company.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PLgOaVXmGU

> Not to mention that their terms dictate they can sell your data. Which obviously is unexpected from a“medical” company.

That seems like it must be skirting the HIPAA line very closely.

I have used their services once and it seems like the biggest issue is that remote therapy probably isn't as beneficial as being in-person. The prices are high for what you get and good luck trying to figure out how to make a claim to your insurance with them.

If you watch H3H3's original videos, it's clear that the edit that PewDiePie watched was misleading to make it seem like Ethan was claiming BetterHelp personally helped him. It took a clip out-of-context from an advertisement-free video. To Ethan's credit, it was clear in his videos that it was paid advertisement and he didn't personally use the service, and he did stop advertising for them.

I'm not sure that's entirely the same as this. If you didn't know exactly how Better Help was setup, it could be difficult to understand that. Also, Better Help may actually provide some value, but just a value that is in a gray area.

Gambling sites masquerading as merchandise seems like it is not in any grey area, it's purely negative. This type of service may even be strictly illegal, so it's a pretty strange situation to see it being advertised so heavily in a major way.

> On the dark side we have channels bursting with (possibly) human trafficked vietnamese women producing sexual content masquerading as slice-of-life

Can you explain for those of us out of the loop...

I tried googling around for a couple minutes, but only found videos about human trafficking hosted in YouTube. I'm curious, too.

paymoneywubby did a video about it last month. https://youtu.be/hc4HzbD0GLI

I think he is referring to these sorts of videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5aPc2wlLiA which are "slice of life" videos taken to their extreme. For an example, here is a slice of life one that isn't so extreme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhkE3e7lT_g

Could bootstrapping one or more YouTube channels starring trafficking victims be profitable enough to attract organized crime? Could someone who knows a bit about YouTube channel growth & revenue streams crunch some numbers to post here?

I assume that "bikini girl" prepended to any video title attract more views than videos of me. "old, chubby bald dude fishing in real life" doesn't seem like a great clickbait title. If there's enough money to be made in "slice of life" videos, I guess it could attract the attention of human traffickers.

> For an example, here is a slice of life one that isn't so extreme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhkE3e7lT_g

That was beautiful, and nothing at all like the sexual ones we're discussing.

I'm not sure if it's the same as what OP was referring to, but there are videos of an attractive Vietnamese woman and her children doing random things (e.g. playing with toys) on the floor, with the woman being in an otherwise decent dress, but then revealing bits of her body seemingly by mistake throughout the video. That is masked as "the life of a Vietnamese family" and gets +1M views, but is clearly just softcore nudity.

I don't understand why people do feel the need to sneak such videos as if they were innocent, in bloody YouTube... And why have children there present at all?!

Helps people remain in denial about what they are watching?

Making the viewers/audience feel like they know or have some connection to the actress (or actor) makes what's effectively porn more rewarding for a lot of people. It's like a more mild form of the difference between looking at boobs on the internet vs your girlfriend sending you nudes (the latter being considered the superior product by most people). Pretty much every porn actress has a twitter/insta/snapchat they use to share mundane stuff in (often in addition to NSFW content). Celebrities in all industries (not just porn) do it too for the same reason. They want to "connect with their fans". Ocean Spray features its farmers on the back of its juice bottles for the same reason. People prefer a product (be that porn, music or a hipster beer) when they feel like they have a personal connection (genuine or not) to the people making it. Of course there's always a risk you rub the customers the wrong way.

paymoneywubby did a video about it [1]. Basically its a woman casually interacting with her children but behaving in very suggestive ways such as opening her legs to expose her underwear or seductively washing the car. Hundreds of videos across lots of channels with one woman, but its part of a whole lot of "super soft-core" youtube.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc4HzbD0GLI

I guess the target market for this is people trapped behind porn filters that can still get YouTube? Seems like a very niche market. This is the Internet, it's not that hard to find porn. If someone is scouring your browser history those softcore channels don't seem like they would be hiding much, unless they have titles like "small engine maintenance -- carburetor cleaning".

I'm trying to imagine some 14 year old boy trying to explain to an angry mother that yes, he's that interested in the boring day to day life details of an Asian mother.

They were (just read that youtube took them down) getting millions of views. From what I understand, ad revenue on a site like youtube is much higher per view than on adult sites because most advertisers are so reluctant to put their product next to adult content. I'm not sure who watches them either, but they were clearly making money producing the content.

Thinking about it some more I bet part of the appeal is the voyeuristic nature of it. It probably feels a lot more like real life, where you very rarely get jumped by horny housewives looking for an anonymous lay, and more realistically get some sideboob or a panty flash from people wearing hot weather clothes.

But as you note, it's mostly a good deal for the producers that can monetize the videos a lot easier on a legit platform like YouTube, and there is probably a reasonably big captive market of people who are trapped behind porn filters.

I came to that video after watching the one about children doing ASMR.

On the one hand, there's a woman providing hours and hours of gratuitous upskirt shots and flashing her panties, made creepy because of the role the children play in it. The sheer scale of the content being uploaded makes it feel less innocuous to me, so it's hard to think this is just a woman indulging in a mild fetish...something else must be going on.

After watching the ASMR video though, I felt utterly disgusted. The mother was on record saying it was fine, and that she was writing 'sassy' role-play stuff that has blatant sexual undertones. It felt to me like a clear case of child exploitation, given the number of subscribers and the mildly pornographic subtext.

I remember some time ago there was another popular youtube channel that was basically a case study on the root cause of Complex PTSD: the father would consistently gaslight one of his kids, under the guise of horseplay, in order to broadcast his kid's reaction to such bullying to a wider audience. Presumably because the parents were making bank from it.

This should not come as a surprise—the internet is full of anything you could imagine and 'rule 34' came about for a reason—but I didn't expect to see something bordering CP on Youtube. Given the monetisation model Youtube has now, I can see why popular YT 'stars' will completely detach from their humanity in order to bring home more bacon.

> I remember some time ago there was another popular youtube channel that was basically a case study on the root cause of Complex PTSD: the father would consistently gaslight one of his kids, under the guise of horseplay, in order to broadcast his kid's reaction to such bullying to a wider audience. Presumably because the parents were making bank from it.

You're thinking of DaddyOFive.

They lost custody of two of their kids (the ones they treated the worst) and eventually got banned from YouTube. Now they have a website, FamilyOFive (he numbers still work because 7 - 2 = 5), where they offer paid content.

I can't begin to understand what it takes, mentally, to lose two of your kids, and then come back to the internet asking for more eyeballs. They have a "Meet The Family" page on their site that omits two of the children, who are no longer part of their family as a result of their behavior. I would have probably had suicidal thoughts just writing that page, and I'm not making a joke or hyperbole here. Sure, who am I to say what sort of punishment they deserve? But good god, you lose two of your kids, you should either be angry or depressed or both, not going straight back to the life you had that led you there. I feel bad for these people.

I think the Internet has created a world in which the number of steps one needs to take before running headfirst into the Earth's greatest evils is getting shorter by the year. It's just going to get harder and harder to insulate yourself from this stuff.

I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing.

> I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing.

How do you think that could be a good thing? Seems like an obviously bad thing to me.

More awareness of evil means more political will to clean it up.

> More awareness of evil means more political will to clean it up.

Maybe, but it seems like people who fall into the echo chamber just vote for the evil doers instead.

I love me some H3H3, and watched this the other day. To me, the craziest part is that YouTube promoted it. To be fair, I'm sure it was an automated system that did it, and not by choice of YouTube but still. Seems like a thing they should have easily been able to quickly correct/fix manually.

YouTube has gotten flak for being biased in their "Trending" promotions recently, so maybe they've taken more of a hands-off approach.

Yeah, I'm sure it's somewhat of a lose-lose for them. If they do it by hand, people will bitch about them "playing favorites", but if a automated system does it, you have problems like this.

Which is how you get people like me screaming at the platforms:

"Stop with this trending nonsense, stop with this "your friends liked" nonsense, stop with this "in case your missed it" nonsense, take your hands off me and just let me mindlessly click and watch whatever videos I feel like watching and react to the tweets I want to react to, I don't need your damn help knowing what my friends are doing or feeling like I need to like something because the platform detected that Jim liked it six hours ago since my last login".

For all this talk about FOMO, it's impossible for me, personally, to NOT look at the culpability the platforms have in it by nagging me all the time about what everyone else is doing and be annoyed by it. I know what they're doing, I see it. I don't need your helicopter parenting to know that, twitter. Keep the trolls in line, keep the lights on, otherwise get out of the way.

In the absence of deliberate algorithms a site like YT has few things to fall back on:

- Sort by time.

- Sort by creator/channel.

- Sort by creator selected content type (fallible).

- Search (a la Google, which sucks on Youtube).

- ???

I wonder if these would be sufficient? Maybe something like Reddit/HN is necessary; some human aggregation and interaction. Would a Reddit style interface work well for video?

A landing page with trending videos (upvotes, comments, threads, etc.), links out to popular subjects/sub-reddits, and so on. Perhaps with an interface like HN which forces people together in one kind of communication (in threads), generous wait periods for new members, and so on...

I suppose that only considers the viewer's use-case. What about monetization? What about creators?

Does YouTube have enough (any) moral compass to avoid making profit in preference to promoting gambling to children?

If they're not fined more than they profit then they're not going to change it.

The incentives of YouTube and Youtubers are aligned against the better interests of society; but that's true of a lot of capitalist activity -- the only way it is going to change is via mass action of the populous (direct action [which might be as simple as changing viewing habits], or legislation).

Yeah that’s why Lizzie-fair doesn’t work. We say that in 18th century UK!

Wait, do you mean "laissez-faire" ?

Yes

> On the dark side we have channels bursting with (possibly) human trafficked vietnamese women producing sexual content masquerading as slice-of-life,

Wait what?

Why would you assume that woman (singular) is trafficked, and not an entrepenuer? Do you think her whole family was abducted and held hostage?

I honestly don't know if the woman in paymoneywubby's video is trafficked or not, but there were a lot of red flags that made me really uncomfortable when combined:

- Frequency and quantity of the uploads indicated she was doing these videos more than full-time

- No verbal interaction other than an occasional glare at cameraman

- Vietnam, not (say) America or Europe

I'd like to give the benefit of the doubt, but something makes me deeply uncomfortable about it.

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