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Comment by bouncycastle | Hacker News Reader

It's like banning Karate & Judo because it teaches violence. (When it actually improves personal security/safety)

Or banning gun videos because they could teach someone how to shoot up a school.

It’s no surprise YouTube opted not to censor this genre based on their workplace shooting incident. Companies are getting more and more paranoid these days.

Gun youtubers were hit very hard by adpocalypse to my knowledge.

Big advertisers dictate what content is allowed on YouTube. Corporations like Disney and Coca Cola get to decide what we can watch.

Aren't there any corporations that market to people who like guns, violent videos, etc? Is if you like guns you don't exist or consume anything? I bet that a lot of people that like guns drink a lot of coca cola and eat a lot of junk food.

Won’t be long until gunsmithing videos about how to manufacture machine guns (legal in most countries with the right license) are banned, too.

EDIT: Spoke too soon. It’s already gone.

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/01/04/coat-hanger-m...

What’s next? Lockpicking?

Bookburnings of the anarchist cookbook, obviously...

Please no! The lock picking lawyer is my favorite :(

Some of those videos should be government sponsored infomercials -- here's how to open a nationally (USA) used door lock in 1s with a magnet.

YouTube is less and less about You.

It's like they've got too much content anyway, so why not just start banning stuff?

Ironically, they remove the videos that people watch, not the thousands of terabytes of videos with 3 clicks in the last 6 years.

It would be sad if they removed the videos with 3 click in the last 6 years, because those are the ones of your granddaughter, living thousands of km away, taking her first steps, or reading her first reading primer by herself. These are the things that help families stay in touch. Just because they don't attract mass clicks (and aren't intended to) does not detract from the value they have for the small number of viewers to whom they matter.

WTH, don't keep that stuff on YT.

Well,... for some people that seems to be the easiest way to distribute it to the whole (widely dispersed, extended) family.

What would you suggest as an alternative?

I'd recommend Firefox Send (https://send.firefox.com/) or maybe Dropbox.

Or whatsapp or signal... Or google drive. Just not YouTube.

Google Photos

Hackers use adblock anyway.

Ah, the Wikipedia strategy.

It is actually probably kind of like that, although not as part of a moralistic panic or a political purge as seem to be the common assumptions. What they likely have is too much content that makes too little money and attracts too few advertisers, so they're willing to lose the content they can most afford to lose. It's a simple cost/benefit analysis to them.

Social media sites which depend on user supplied content use that content to advertise the platform. Maybe no one told Youtube content creators that they were really doing sales work for Google, but that's always been the nature of the modern social media model. They don't work for you, you work for them.

TANSTAAFL.

*google

*alphabet

Now that you said it, GTube rebranding seems imminent, especially with Google's track record on such things.

Trying to apply logic to a political decision is like playing chess with a pigeon.

I agree it is stupid to ban such items on such grounds but:

with "actually improves personal security/safety" I do not agree. If you are not training daily watching video about martial arts does nothing to improve your personal safety. Though there is guy having gym in China who is explaining it better than me and he has martial arts channel. But that is one guy vs tons of "self defence bullshit".

I've not had YouTube around when I was learning karate, so I don't know if I'd be using it if I was learning karate now. However, I did use it to learn some dance moves, and although I was just sitting in my chair and watching it, it did help a lot with many "aha" moments and practiced them later. Sure, there is a lot of crap on there, but I can filter that myself. Things in karate that you could just learn by watching without much training are pressure points and how to get out of someone's hold. The other stuff needs training (especially conditioning), but a good video can give you directions for how to do it.

Isn't this the problem of the viewers' own doing? Youtube would not give a shit until someone feels offended by it and complaints. So we can blame corportions all we want but we should also think how much of it is influenced by us. Note: above only applies to the comment about violence. Infosec thing most likely is different.

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