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Comment by scrps | Hacker News Reader

Yet you can browse youtube and learn how to build an AR-15 lower reciever, learn tactical shooting, and knife fighting*... But for the love of all things lawful don't explain a buffer overflow or a side-channel attack.

I am not suggesting those videos/channels be banned either just pointing the uneven absurdity of YT's policies.

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Gun channels have almost all been demonetized. In fact, just about every vertical is "demonetized" in large portions of their content creators. It's almost like youtube is the only one profiting at scale, weird.

YouTube makes no money on demonitized videos as well, right?

If they run ads on them they do. Demonetized just means the creators don’t see any.

Is that something YouTube does? I was under the impression demonitized videos had no ads of any kind. As opposed to the copyright system rules where you will get ads but the revenue is diverted to someone else instead.

you are right. demonitized means unsuitable for advertisers, which means no ads.

To clarify - often videos will have ads on them prior to being demonetized. My understanding is that when this happens, YT keeps all of the ad revenue and the creator sees none. Over time this is a lot of money I am sure.

Maybe not on hard demonetized, but they will run ads on videos of creators that are not eligible for the partner program:

https://www.engadget.com/youtube-ads-on-small-creator-videos...

*don't see any from the Youtube Partner Program. They're still free to get sponsors and run their own advertisements. That just requires, you know, work.

YouTube doesn't run ads on demonetized videos - that's what demonetizing a channel is all about. It means the advertisers don't want to pay for the ads to show next to those videos.

https://www.quora.com/If-a-video-is-demonetized-can-ads-stil...

It is a loss leader then and they profit indirectly.

Well I presume they would just kick the creators off if they thought they could get away with it without massive backlash, they're happy to randomly ban them at least

YouTube doesn't profit from demonetized channels. Why are these channels entitled to money from people that don't want to give it to them?

Youtube still certainly does, from ads played before users without ad blockers can watch the videos.

Are there not gun companies that would want to advertise on these gun channels? Seems like a lot of YouTube's problems would go away if they just allowed advertisers to choose which channels to show ads on.

A lot of the gun channels have been de-monitized. Most of them have recorded promotions for various companies as part of the video. Others use patreon to fund the channel.

De-monitized just means advertisers don't want to advertise on those channels via YouTube. It doesn't mean the channel can't find other means of funding itself. It's not YouTube's responsibility to fund a channel regardless of feedback from its advertisers. Simply put, you can't expect free money.

> De-monitized just means advertisers don't want to advertise on those channels via YouTube

It means YouTube believes that advertisers don't want to advertise, or that journalists are running hit pieces on the vertical.

It may be correlated to advertiser demands, but the direct causation isn't there most of the time.

I actually like demonetized videos. Interesting topics, no ads :).

Yes, it is not a good thing for creators, and they must be creative in finding ways to get paid.

If advertisers want to be on that channel, they can still advertise on that channel. Stop spreading misinformation.

They have removed ALOT of gun channels as well. Most of the bigger Gun channels now just talk about news / reviews not really educational for that it is moved to BitChute or other YT Alternatives

I had never heard of bitchute. Going in, the first recommended video is:

"A Jew asks why do people deny The Holocaust?...and admits the 6 Million figure is fake" from the account "Holocaust Lies Explained".

Soo... yeah. Par for the course for "uncensored alternative" sites I guess?

Yes uncensored sites will have distasteful, terrible, and repugnant content.

That is a GOOD thing, and a FEATURE not a deterrent.

You do not defeat bad ideas, and repugnant ideologies with suppression of speech. Sorry it does not work that way no matter how much the Authoritarian Left and the Authoritarian Right would love it to

You don't defeat bad ideas by promoting them either; you defeat them with shame, i.e. consequences for being willfully ignorant or acting like a jackass. But the internet rarely delivers meaningful feedback to the folks that craft this type of "distasteful, terrible, and repugnant content."

Now, you might be the sort of person that would choose to live with a group of sadistic trolls for the edification that might result. I suspect most humans would react badly to that type of environment; our psychology is not well adapted to a constant barrage of persuasive deception and emotional manipulation.

Personally, I hope this latest crop of trashtube sites is driven offline and into bankruptcy; the sooner, the better.

You can't defeat bad ideas with shaming; shaming means you don't have an argument and are approaching the topic as a belief. You cannot persuade others with your beliefs.

You can defeat ideas only with better, well argumented ideas.

I used to believe that as well. But it seems that even a "well argumented" idea can get very little traction unless the circumstances are right, i.e. your interlocutor doesn't care much about the topic. There was some study about this a little bit ago, where pointing out problems with an erroneous but established "fact" just caused people to dig further into their position, even after the "fact" their position was supposedly based on was proved to be completely and irredeemably false.

This is the problem with letting idiots and hucksters push out garbage "facts" - they build communities that are uninterested in counter-arguments. It doesn't even matter if the "facts" are somehow eventually refuted, because the attitudes informed by them have already hardened. And, the only way I can think of to prevent those idiots and hucksters from being so effective is to introduce some kind of social restraint - thus, shame.

The point was not "there are repugnant ideas". The point was "the first thing shown to me, on the front page, are repugnant ideas". Big difference.

Free alternative sites always seem to end up being just, or at least mainly, a place for hosting extremists. call it the voat effect if you will.

And to be clear, I do think that having that kind of content being offered a platform is not, at all, good. But I don't think you need to agree with that to agree with the specific point I was making.

And the reason those sites will never see mainstream success is because the selection bias is too strong. They all are inherently seeded by highly disproportionate numbers of users that are outcasts from other services, and that sets the tone of the community from the start.

Also, to know what ideas you oppose and why, you need to be able to look into them.

I really miss the discussions of manufacturing improvements and design revisions that Ian Mc-whatever has in his older videos. Even if he's uploading elsewhere he's tailoring he newer stuff to the YT rules so he's not discussing manufacturing as much. Which is stupid when you consider that so much of the stuff he deals with is historical curiosities from over a century ago and incremental manufacturing innovations of the industrial revolution was what spurred the creation of a lot of the stuff he deals with.

> Ian Mc-whatever

We just call him Gun Jesus

They don't let him talk about manufacturing? That makes no sense. Though I guess he's just reverse engineering the rules so it could be some random thing he's mentioned a few times when discussing manufacturing that YouTube takes offence to.

Well he probably could and defend it since it's historical education but Youtube's enforcement is so sporadic and heavy handed and the appeals process is so broken it's not worth the risk.

They’ve issued rules prohibiting all sorts of firearm related content. Firearm and ammunition manufacture is banned. You won’t find build receiver videos any more. And since rules are vague it has chilled much other content. Is replacing hand grip assembly? Is refurbishing milsurp Moses?

> I am not suggesting those videos / channels be banned either just pointing the uneven absurdity of YT's policies.

I make the same clarifications in each comment I make so as not to receive a wave of downvotes, it is incredible how HN decreases in quality more and more.

Just to clarify, I didn't make that distinction to avoid downvotes, I made it because I believe it, down or up votes be damned. If the freedom to exchange knowledge has devolved into a popularity contest that determines what knowledge is acceptable to share then we should all be very afraid.

Personally, I am not interested in getting positive votes, but it bothers me that my comment is "censored" by a couple of people who did not understand what I said and who do not even participate in the conversation... It is like if you were in a meeting in your work and a random person on the street say that your idea is bad and they do not take you into account for it.

I make similar distinctions in some of my comments. Without that distinction, the author's point about inconsistencies may not make sense. The downvotes can sometimes be a symptom of that lack of clarity.

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