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Comment by mothsonasloth | Hacker News Reader

This is absolutely shocking.

On one side, we have an extremely manipulative individual/group of people.

On the other we have gullible users, some of which are enabling this abuse by donating money and or sharing this content to other people.

Then in the middle of this sandwich we have the platforms, taking their cut.

I've seen other cases like this but on facebook with conjured sob stories that led to justgiving pages.

Not sure what the solution is apart from relying on good samaritans and people looking out for this bad behaviour.

However I can't remember who said it, but someone said "good people don't scale well on the internet"

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I can't help but agree. I used to somewhat immune to that kind of pandering until I got a dog myself and now I simply cannot watch some of the ads/news/videos that deal with various animal rescues.

I absolutely get how some people's first reaction is to take the easy way and reach for a wallet. After all, the need is there and there seem to be people who seem to be helping. It does help that I don't have that much money to spare so when I donate, it is usually time and not money.

Frankly, I was trying to convince wife to create a dog sanctuary for a while.

Still, while there is special place in hell for some of animal abusers, the middlemen and scammers have their own little ring in there too.

The youth that I interact with has grown to be automatically sceptical of such things.

There's a generation growing up that doesn't take anything at face value. I wonder what the second order effects of this will be?

Management is getting harder. I have a generation of developers that won't believe anything we tell them.

What sort of things do they not believe?

I mean, how often are you telling them the real, true, unadulterated truth? How often do you even know that truth yourself?

Folks in management routinely filter messages. What surprises me more is that you are aware that your developers don't believe you.

Knowledge is being abused en masse to win arguments and drive action. We are beginning to need a source for sacred, clean and trustworthy knowledge again.

It has to be edited by paid employees, legally sound and maintained. wikipedia doesnt cut it.

People are actively darkening their own worldviews by arguing themselves out of good knowledge and swimming into fake news for the thrill of victory. Heady aggression is killing our ability to hold rational positions, when they start misquoting fifteen studies and claiming the 'truth' is whatever they want to know.

I think that one of the long-term effects will be some kind of extreme localism/tribalism. People will trust only the information from their own bubble. And that will inlfuence how do they vote, what do they buy etc. I think we are already seeing it, especailly in the politics - in so many countries the voters have turned towards nationalism.

This is a generation that is being bombarded with information of various forms and they understand that most of it is pure garbage/noise. I guess they're adapting by having more discernement.

> There's a generation growing up that doesn't take anything at face value.

it's more like they pick what to take at face value...

>There's a generation growing up that doesn't take anything at face value.

I wish, my son came to me recently to tell me about how he is gonna get free robux on Roblox because someone on Roblox told him to do it.

Like in every other way I watch him and he's safe and smart but the moment humans hear a thing they want to be true ... out the window goes good choices.

There were a series of stories about how "this generation can spot fake news better than the last" that seemed encouraging ... but if you looked closer, the "this generation" was still really bad at it ...

> my son came to me recently to tell me about how he is gonna get free robux on Roblox because someone on Roblox told him to do it.

He's learning, that's a valuable lesson.

I don't believe this event alone supports the conclusion you try to make:

> the moment humans hear a thing they want to be true ... out the window goes good choices

I agree that he is learning a lesson. I learned the common scams by getting scammed in the mmorpgs I played when I was a teenager.

I think the motivation / folks willingness to believe something less than believable totally is part of how folks get scammed.

For what its worth getting scammed in video game is a lot better than getting scammed IRL, while you learn the same lesson.

Very true. I can think of much worse things.

But once he gets burned by his first armor trimming scam he'll become much more skeptical no?

I think the second-order effects of that will be fantastic. Skepticism and critical thinking are sorely missing today- at least in the US.

The insane part to me is just that the bar for killing content in YT is already so low, why don't they just kill it? I mean I was watching videos where people had to bleep the word "massacre" and hace been told by others that words like "incursion" and "Saladin" have to be censored else they run the risk of demonitized content.

You're not allowed to discuss Saladin? The medieval Arab[0] general? Why not?

[0] correction: Kurdish, not Arab.

I'm not sure. I was told by a guy who does streaming for historical strategy games that this was a word he had to censor or else his vidoes got demonetized. Every single one of those words I listed could be discussed in a completely SFW, educational, historical context but I've either heard or heard of videos bleeping them. Perhaps its just hyper-caution on the side of the uploader.

Saladin was ethnically Kurdish, so I wonder if someone of Arab, Persian, or Turkish (or whatever other groups might have a historical beef with the Kurds) descent works at Youtube has an axe to grind. Or maybe the Crusades are considered a touchy subject by someone at Youtube?

Stuff like this has happened before, I remember a year or two ago on Twitter there was someone who was friends with someone on the moderation team at Twitter and got them to shut down anyone tweeting anything negative about them, I can't remember the details at the moment. Or years ago on Reddit you couldn't criticize a certain moderator that had a friend who was an admin for the site.

> Or maybe the Crusades are considered a touchy subject by someone at Youtube?

Or more plausibly and less conspiracy-esque, a company like YouTube will eventually come up with a formula like:

    threshold=1.5
    if hassle(topic) / threshold > revenue(topic):
        ban(topic)

I.e. maybe they don't care at all about the subject, but dealing with reported videos, comments, the PR impact from flamewars about a contentious subject etc. just isn't worth it.

All for a topic that's hard to monetize, easier just to ban it and move on.

These fake content farms are lucrative, it seems the demonetized items you're talking about are bad for advertisers. It's kind of like the stock market; you're not betting against what you believe, you're betting against what you think the general public will believe.

Isn't this what the BBC used to do?[0]

[0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/bbc-david-attenborough-...

This sounds a lot like reality TV that claims to be unscripted, but clearly isn't.

I can donate to The Real Housewives of Atlanta?

I’m almost positive if you told them about patreon they would do it if they haven’t already. Or onlyfans...

> "good people don't scale well on the internet"

Where do good people scale well? Hollywood, news, DC, politics, military, wall street, etc?

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