YouTube Takes Down Chess Podcast for Being Harmful or Dangerous | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Takes Down Chess Podcast for Being Harmful or Dangerous

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92 pointscsense33 comments

The video/stream in question was restored almost 5 days ago, shortly after this happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrFa4B0Ghjk&feature=youtu.be

AI misses will happen, I'm generally okay with them if they're identified and resolved quickly. The concerning thing to me here is that his request for appeal was rejected in 30 seconds. What actually happens when you click appeal? Clearly it's automated, so why not run that logic before taking the stream down?

I've never heard of the appeal actually doing anything other than just existing. Maybe it notes down that the user attempted to appeal (which may be a useful signal for YT), but I wouldn't be surprised if it's just sends a single template response to every request.

If they're really random, that's not so bad. Just like other computer failures. But Youtube alters people's behavior out of fear. You see Youtubers replacing "dangerous" words with joke words even though they're not saying anything bad, they're just scared. Often it's no use that it gets restored the next day because the prime money making time has passed.

Options to appeals are probably just there to string people along and wear them down.

It seems that saying things like "black is in trouble, white is always better in this scenario" might have triggered the algorithm.

The guy on the channel said he doesn't think this is the case, since he has loads of other videos still up and its "white vs black to the death" in every case. His other guess was that it was a casual mention of the "Covid situation". It's too bad that he is left guessing about what the problem really was, and that the review procedure is apparently fully automated.

I've noticed that other YouTubers, for example the Game Grumps, have stated that they cannot mention "Covid" in their videos for fear of being demonetized or taken down. To get around it, they refer to the situation as the "Backstreet Boys Reunion Tour" instead.

Yeah, in this case it was just something like mentioning that people stuck indoors in some cases were playing chess (online) for the first time in years.

YouTube is pretty famous for having poorly implemented moderation. My favorite instance is when they banned CGP Grey for impersonating himself.

I mostly see it referred to as "the current situation (around the world)".

Time to change chess-pieces to green and blue, at least until we met Aliens ;)

Are there really no popular alternatives to Youtube to keep them honest? It is the virtual monopoly that allows them to be complacent enough to enforce such lousy automation. This is not healthy.

it's a loss leader, no one is going to try to compete with it.

This is a myth it seems to me. As far as I can tell, YouTube makes money. I'd be interested in sources that show otherwise, but not speculative sources.

How can you just tell it’s making money? Can you elaborate please?

It generated $15 billion last year not including 20 million Premium subscribers.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

This is the first time Google has released this information. It’s also likely this is the first year that YouTube was profitable.

>It generated $15 billion last year not including 20 million Premium subscribers.

To clarify, that $15 billion is revenue and not net income/profit. Since Alphabet Inc didn't reveal the internal costs for Youtube, it means we still don't know if Youtube is losing money, or breaking even, or making a profit. So the gp's question of "how do we know it's making money?" is still unanswered.

Another example to help differentiate revenue vs profit: Tesla "generated" $24 billion in revenue last year but it didn't "make money" because they still lost $862 million.[1] No profits.

It doesn't help that the journalist of your The Verge article further confuses readers by incorrectly using the phrase "bottom line" instead of the "top line".[2] Revenue is actually the "top line". Net income/profit is the "bottom line":

>, that the company has revealed how much money YouTube-hosted ads contribute to the search giant’s _bottom line_. On an annual basis, Google says YouTube generated $15 billion last year and contributed roughly 10 percent to all Google revenue.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+revenue+2019+loss

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_statement

Video needs huge amount of storage and network capacity. Google is one few players, who don't need pay for their Internet, they change most of traffic by mutual settlement free peering. If you go with making your own youtube, then you are seriosly disadvantaged by that. Secondly, they can buy their disks directly from manufacturer, probably using bidding. So, even their storage costs are much lower, than you can hope.

For a podcast? There's plenty. I mean you could just host it on a simple WordPress site if nothing else.

Twitch is the only thing I can think of that resembles a viable competitor to YouTube. Of late I tend to find myself watching a lot more live streams on Twitch than prerecorded videos on YouTube.

Of course it’s not for everyone. Some of the best YouTube channels are well produced and edited. You don’t get that with a live stream.

Well its not popular, but a decentralized alternative exists:

https://joinpeertube.org/

I know of https://www.bitchute.com/ - but you are right, we need more alternatives in order to keep them honest.

YouTube so big that every time they decide to upgrade facilities and buy new space they drive the prices of hard drives up for about a year quite substantially.

I’ve noticed these “click to appeal” links (on YouTube, and other places) always have a near instantaneous turn around time, and they always rejected. Conspiracy me, suspects that all appeals are rejected by rule, to scare people from appealing further, and only these much fewer second appeals are actually reviewed.

I suspect all appeals are rejected and only get reviewed if the channel has enough pull to smack Google on social media.

It's not like that sort of thing is some new social media/tech innovation. I remember being hearing or reading if you're turned down for SSDI, you've got to keep appealing, because there are metrics being used where they can't approve more than a certain percentage initially.

I'm thinking that they know everyone will appeal, but by threatening them on second appeal, you thin it out to people that actually think they have a case.

Still, it's obviously a bullshit process.

Censorship is bad. Discuss a better future for video at https://www.reddit.com/r/YoutubeAlternatives/. Current options seem like Bitchute (https://www.bitchute.com/), LBRY (https://lbry.com/), and D.tube (https://d.tube/).

Reddit and Twitter alternatives are listed at https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...

Not sure why this is getting downvoted so heavily, there is another comment above which is asking about competition in this space and this comment is just sharing some links relevant to that discussion. Thanks parent.

Are those sites long-term alternatives? What is to say Bitchute won't be bought by a giant corporation one day?

A site I was a longtime member of and helped grow wrote "Yes, we promised to always keep the site free. We now break that promise. To access content, from now on will require a subscription." Everyone who uploads videos to these video sites runs the risk of the owner commercializing their work.

It's Time to Ban Chess: https://www.accredited-times.com/2020/05/15/its-time-to-ban-...

I’m a big fan of agadmator - he makes incredible content and definitely never anything harmful

YouTube cops gone mad

This seems to be an honest mistake, but unfortunately I can only see this becoming more common in the years to come.

I was discussing this with a friend recently. Specifically, we were wondering what the incentive would be, if any, for big-tech to stop this trend towards increased censorship.

Obviously censoring anything that could be perceived as controversial is good for the bottom-line of these companies, but it's also worth remembering there's little to no political incentive to ensure free-speech on these platforms either.

If the only political content YouTube promotes is from the main-stream media and the only fact checkers Twitter and Facebook are using are from the legacy media, then these actions work in favour of establishment politicians.

For years corporations and the media have been basically able to dictate political candidates to the public, but in 2016 that momentarily changed due to rise in influence social media had.

I suspect Youtube, et al. have finally wised up and that's why we're seeing this sudden increase in the big-tech censorship. They don't want another Sanders or Trump slipping through the cracks.

This year at this point in time obviously the biggest threat is from the right with Trump, and Biden is seen as the safe establishment bet, so the direction of the censorship for now is towards the right. But make no mistake, if the safe candidate was on the right you'd see these companies take a very different view on what's acceptable and not acceptable to say.

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