YouTube reinstates Right Wing Watch
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YouTube permanently bans Right Wing Watch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27665188 - June 2021 (172 comments)
If Google did not fix mistakes that generated a lot of outrage, then competitors could differentiate themselves by providing better moderation policies and whenever some popular account got banned from YouTube that would generate a lot of traffic for alternatives. As is, if something popular gets banned, YouTube will "correct" their error while they ignore things below this threshold. This simultaneously subjects everyone to their poor moderation and stifles an advantage that competitors might enjoy.
"...competitors could differentiate themselves by providing better moderation policies and whenever some popular account got banned from YouTube that would generate a lot of traffic for alternatives"
While it might boost you initial user-base its gonna make growth slow to a crawl long term unless you have some clever way if dealing with it.
Just yesterday, a group posting Xinjiang videos was censored from YouTube.[1]
Are their videos going to be reinstated? Unlikely. They will have to try their luck on some obscure platform
Imagine if you had video evidence of human rights abuses (lots of people do), just hope that you can raise enough outrage quickly enough before it gets flagged and removed.
I know that Google and Facebook are private platforms, but that should not excuse them covering for genocidal maniacs.[2]
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-youtube-takes-d...
[2]: https://www.propublica.org/article/sheryl-sandberg-and-top-f...
Slippery slope arguments would need entire dissertations of evidence to even be plausibly considered, and yet they’re one of the most common methods of naysaying.
While you’re technically correct, I’m functionally correct.
Showing that you can get n+3 via separate evidence for n+1, n+2, and n+3 says nothing about n+7
And not moderating them is a slippery slope to facilitating violent extremism, and to anti-science activists leading an otherwise-developed country to top the chart in pandemic deaths.
There's no perfect solution, only compromises which have to be made.
As for false information, quackery, etc... there would be icons that people could up/downvote to provide public opinion as to something being false information. Post a video of the earth being flat? No problem, go right ahead. People can upvote the "Cool story bro" icon. Quackery icons will slowly de-rank a video from showing up in suggested. There would also be industry specific icons and people verified to be from those industries could double-up-vote icons as well as post comments with a checkmark next to their name linking to their public credentials and contact information. Cost? The verification process would pay for itself. Being a verified subject matter expert provides exposure for the individual, so there is incentive to pay to be manually verified. Being a SME does not grant the ability to remove a video, only the ability to add a comment with a checkmark. Not all SME's will agree with one another. Let the merits of their conversations drive public opinion and emoji voting. Post a cure for covid or cancer? Go for it. Verified doctors and scientists can post checkmark comments and upvote the quackery emojis if they feel it is required. Or they could upvote the green checkmark if they agree. More verified checkmarks equates to higher rank in suggested content.
[0] https://www.contagionlive.com/view/ivermectin-to-be-analyzed...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/05/11/indian-...
Also worth noting hiding behind "just discussing" something is a slippery slope in its own right. There's a long history of people claiming to be "just asking questions" when they're transparently using "discussion" as a means to spread fringe ideology.
Its completely true based on my FB or twitter feed where you can find thousands of people who couldn't pass a GED test arguing a bout science that they don't understand.
Yikes. I can only imagine how little progress we would have made as a civilization with an a approach like that.
Limiting fat and protein in favor of carbs in one’s diet is a good example. This bad advice lead to an obesity epidemic that has killed millions of people.
As it stands, I am very skeptical that you could find any such evidence.
The way to change consensus is evidence-based advocacy by experts, not idle speculation by the domain-uneducated.
Without the discussion many of the topis scientist study and figure out the truth would never have happened.
We need the conversations and even controversy help decide where we spend the resource of what scientist study.
edit: gatekeeping
The funding to eventually overturn this bad science was suppressed at mainstream institutions and had to be obtained from the very outsiders you condemn. Phrenology and scientific racism were embraved by the experts for decades. Lucky for us, people didn't follow your advice then.
Notwithstanding the merits or lack thereof of your point, the videos about chloroquine and ivermectin that were banned WERE discussions by medical professionals. Have you seen them?
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/frontiers-removes...
The statement continues: “Further, the authors promoted their own specific ivermectin-based treatment which is inappropriate for a review article and against our editorial policies. In our view, this paper does not offer an objective nor balanced scientific contribution to the evaluation of ivermectin as a potential treatment for COVID-19.”
Now, a lot of less honest publications like to compare the total number of deaths in order to cynically take advantage of the fact that there are few countries as big as the USA, but of course that's a nonsense comparison. If the USA was instead split up into 50 countries, it'd be much further down that ranking even if the exact same number of people died.
I don't know where you got this list from. JHU's database[1] shows Peru and Brazil at the top for the per-capita statistic (not CFR). Brazil, conspicuously, has a COVID-denialist leader, refused a general lockdown, and is currently #3 in the world for deaths.
(Also, Brazil is probably pretty representative of South America as a whole, they just seem to have better testing than other countries there and likely report more of their Covid deaths than others. I know a while ago, there was some analysis suggesting Mexico had more Covid deaths than Brazil with a substantially lower population and was just massively under-reporting them due to missing testing.)
Underneath that chart they break down data for many more than those 20 countries.
The US is currently 74th of 203 countries when counting new covid cases per capita in the last week. So my perception is people have mostly switched to shaming the US for "vaccine nationalism" and the like, and downplaying accusations of poor handling of the epidemic.
(https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/weekly-trends/#wee...)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
If states were countries, half of the top 20 per capita would consist of US States, with the other half essentially being developing nations.
In fact, I'd say that the only reason the US per capita rate is as low as it is is that states like California (itself accounting for over a tenth of the population) actually took things seriously and brought down that average.
Split hairs all you want, but the fact that the US at one point accounted for a quarter of all cases despite being 4% of the world's population is a stain on the whole country, and a significant argument that the US is directly to blame for the pandemic lasting as long as it did.
The Federal Government cannot restrict citizens from traveling between the states. I don't know anyone, here in the US anyway, who would even suggest such an action.
The privileges and immunities clause, Article IV, Section 2, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution, protects the interstate travel rights of US citizens.
In fact travel rights were actually restricted in practice by the Federal Government and it's agencies, and states under both Republican and Democrat leadership. There are many well established exceptions that restrict access to constitutional rights under various circumstances, so the contention that this can't be done falls a bit flat. If nobody can do it, how come everybody did it?
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us
I'll let it speak for itself.
It has little to do with that. If that were the case, Florida would not have been within spitting distance of California. Why is New York at the top of list? They had a similar response as California.
The issue is far more complex than "taking things seriously". Population density, climate, age of population, and job types probably contribute more than simply "taking things seriously".
Well, the USA does top the chart in pandemic deaths. You instead just talk about deaths per capita, and call that misinformation. Ok, but that's not what the GP was talking about. A total straw man.
Then when you get around to mentioning total pandemic deaths, look at all the emotive words you pack into the sentence:
> less honest publications like to compare the total number of deaths in order to cynically take advantage of the fact that there are few countries as big as the USA, but of course that's a nonsense comparison.
There is a perfect solution, which is for the government & the corporatist state to defend our rights, which include the Freedom of Speech. Somebody is lying & the public has a right to all of the pertinent information & unrestricted conversation. The worst case is for the liars to have total control of the information. Those are the definitions of totalitarianism & authoritarianism.
---
Edit: I actually misspoke. The worst case is Technocratic control a la Brave New World, where autonomy is lost & cyber (regulatory) divisions take over all aspects of life. Nothing screams dystopia more than a technocrat with a God complex exerting one's will to control the lives of the population. Human life is sacred & spiritual and the Technocratic movement as it stands today spoils this light to create a horde of undead.
Bringing up the first amendment is a way to emphasize the importance of the free exchange of ideas. It only legally restrains the government, but now other powers have gained the ability to regulate speech. The principle is the same no matter who the censor is.
For example, look at how the lab-leak hypothesis for covid was censored. There were many good questions being raised that were shot down as a "conspiracy theory", and were censored.
This is a net negative for everyone.
However you justify censorship, it still has a cost. Legalistic arguments about the first amendment and who it restrains doesn't change the fact that the free exchange of ideas has value and that is being taken away from us. Note that I'm not specifying who is doing the censoring in any of my arguments. Censorship has a cost all on it's own.
If we sit a team down to discuss the architecture of a software application or how to solve a problem in a general, is it better to get all opinions or for some opinions to be forbidden?
I believe the answer is it depends. If someone is being destructive to general collaboration, then censoring them would likely help the group reach a better decision.
If the censorship goes further and prohibits certain ideas, what is the cost? If it's a bad idea, probably not too much. What if it's a good idea? What if it's an idea that would have halved the effort for this particular solution? The cost of censorship starts to increase!
How do you know the value of an opinion that you don't hear? Silencing dissent is a component of group think. I found this example which shouldn't be controversial:
Claiming that these corporations have the "freedom of speech" is just like claiming that the government has the "freedom of speech". These corporations are an extension of the government. This is why a company needs to hire many lawyers, have a political presence, & often has many ex-3 letter agency executive/board members once it reaches a certain size. These corporations can do things that the official government cannot, yet they are controlled by the same networks that control the official government.
And restricting speech is not speech itself and does not deserve protection, anymore than me gagging your mouth is an expression of the freedom of speech. Restriction of speech does happen, no matter how much one tried to redefine or recontextualize the circumstances. Slavery also does happen today. We can play all sorts of cognitive games to deny these realities, but people are still affected in an exploitative way, which is disgusting, immoral, & goes against everything that brings the best out of humanity.
The father of Scientism demonstrates the arrogance of the adherents of Scientism/Technocracy and the reason why any critics of Scientism/Technocracy are demonized. This is why adherents of Scientism/Technocracy strive to infringe on peoples', particularly critics', freedom of speech by funneling markets & discourse through captured platforms & restricting participation & speech on these platforms. Technocrats in the government actively support & play rearguard these endeavors.
"A scientist, my dear friends, is a man who foresees; it is because science provides the means to predict that it is useful, and the scientists are superior to all other men."
–Henri de Saint-Simon
Anybody reading this can get a thorough education on the Techcracy via Patrick Wood's books. "Technocracy, The Hard Road to World Order" is his latest...
Social media companies don't restrict your speech, because you were never entitled to use their services in the first place. If you compel them to distribute your message, you are violating their rights. You don't even seem to understand the issue at hand here.
As for the rest of your vacuous comment, it's like a high school sophomore trying to appear deep.
Your insults only expose the fact that you have no interest in ethics or logic, only power. Like a spoiled brat, you want power over other people & you want it now. What a way to run a civilization. The inconsiderate spoiled brats want to tell everybody else what to do.
You haven't responded to my point above, and instead went on another irrelevant diatribe that I don't care about.
Have we really learned nothing over the last year and a half? What will it take to shake your faith in the media?
Four weeks ago, the idea that COVID-19 originated from a lab was a conspiracy theory, likely to get you banned with extreme prejudice for being a qanon white supremecist.
COVID-19 was a conspiracy theory. Then it was a conspiracy theory that human to human transmission was possible. Then it was a conspiracy theory that wearing masks was at all helpful.
What will be the next domino to fall? What will the new truth be a few weeks from now?
If anything, censoring "conspiracy theories" led directly to the COVID-19 pandemic.
If this was 2015, I think things would have gone much better for us. Citizens would have been able to fill in the gaps where journalists failed us. There might have been a panic for people to buy masks and close the borders, sure, but the pandemic would have probably been contained.
I was banned for spreading conspiracy theories in February 2020 when I pleaded with people to practice basic hygiene and postpone travel until we had figured out what was going on.
More info here: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jqbx/reddit-cant-quarantin...
Also here: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/f6jpm7/what_i...
And a quote from /r/OutOfTheLoop about /r/WuhanFlu:
> The users of that subreddit believe in a conspiracy that the Wuhan Coronavirus is more serious than the governments of China and the United States are telling them. They believe the government is mismanaging the outbreak. They were quarantined because an admin believed the subreddit was spreading misinformation.
Note that /r/WuhanFlu was already talking about this mismanagement since mid-January.
Unfortunately @apostacy (who is getting downvoted) is from what I experienced back then mostly right.
Meanwhile the other corona-subreddits were and/or still are controlled by moderators that also control many of the other largest Reddit-approved (corona-)subreddits:
https://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1582202873483.jpg (Sorry, this 4chan archive of the image is all I could still find)
And this is all just one example of how crazy things can get and not even the worst (like people getting doxxed and personally harassed, getting banned on multiple sites en masse etc.). Many people who aren't in the right place at the right time within certain communities probably can't even imagine things like this could happen (like I couldn't 6 years ago) until it happens to them. They just call you a "conspiracy theorist". Not everyone who is skeptical of the mainstream story believes in "flat earth", is "anti-vaxx", thinks they want to "inject us with microchips" and "control us with 5G". Those are used as an example to censor and/or discredit other alternative views.
All we did on that subreddit was just trying to find out what was happening before everyone was talking about it (which was suspicious in itself).
Seems a bit crude to pick on Czechia, Belgium, Italy, Britain, Spain and France like that. Surely they're not so anti-science as you're suggesting.
Covid deaths per 1,000 population:
Czechia: 2.85 | Belgium: 2.2 | Italy: 2.11 | Britain: 1.93 | US: 1.84 | Spain: 1.73 | France: 1.65 | Sweden: 1.43
And if we were analyzing trends, Germany rather dramatically joined the Covid party toward the end (with an extreme death rate across a rough five month span). Was that due to a mass spontaneous national anti-science movement on their part? I don't think so.
It doesn't matter. You should not be censoring peoples opinions or them asking questions. The lab leak hypothesis should have never been censored. Maybe if someone was claiming they knew it was true without providing sufficient evidence I could see a case for it. Calling something misinformation when they aren't presenting it as fact but a possibility is disgraceful especially when it comes to journalism.
Not theorists. They researched and published actual conspiracies, based on government documentation.
Journalists use youtube to get a wider audience, but youtube is not really a mechanism of original reporting. It's not Physical Review Letters, it's Popular Science. If things were otherwise, if getting a true and important fact idea kicked off youtube could actually silence it, we'd already be screwed.
The problem isn’t who YouTube relies on for “the truth.” It’s that they’re removing “untrue” videos in the first place.
All the angst in this thread mystifies me. You might as well go to a strip bar and then act shocked and outraged that your steak is overcooked. Of course it is; you're in the wrong place. The solution is to not to demand that youtube do a better job of curating science information for you, it's to not get your science information from youtube.
Recent history seems to have an answer - thats off limits until it fits the narrative!
And their censorship really is loathsome. I don't need mega-corporations telling me what is and isn't ok to see and hear.
What is the percentage?
Two things:
A. Even if true, that is still a price worth paying to avoid having a central arbiter of truth that political factions can fight over and eventually control.
B. Lack of access to good counterarguments/innoculation to the radical ideas is a consequence of those ideas being supressed. If people don't even know what a radicalized person believes how can they help dig them out of the hole they are in? It's one of the reasons why "scientific racism" continues to grow.
Or if you will moderate content, then be held liable for your mistakes. Both censorship or recommending false information should make YouTube liable for damages.
"The rise of neo-Nazism and other forms of militant, hard-right reactionary ideology, as well as vaccine deniers, and the hundreds of thousands of lives they have provably cost us, are a price worth paying to make sure that no one can tell me I can't post whatever videos I want on a privately-owned video hosting site."
"And one person gets up and says, “you know what, this holocaust, I’m not even sure it happened. In fact, I’m
pretty certain it didn’t. Indeed, I begin to wonder if the only thing is that the Jews brought a little bit of
violence on themselves.”—That person doesn’t just have a right to speak, that person’s right to speak must be
given extra protection. Because what he has to say must have taken him some effort to come up with. Might
contain a grain of historical truth; might, in any case, give people to think why do they know what they
think they already know. How do I know I know this except I’ve always been taught this and never heard any
thing else? It’s always worth establishing first principle….don’t take refuge in the false security of
consensus and the feeling that, whatever you think, you’re bound to be okay because you’re in the safely, moral
majority"
I think one of the things we've been learning real hard as a globally interconnected species is, if people can do nefarious shit through insisting their intentions be taken in good faith, over a large enough sampling size they WILL do nefarious shit because it is in their interest to do so.
It's like criminal justice. If you look at a large enough population you begin to run into people where you can't take their word on things. And mandating that such people must have the ability to make their case is not the same thing as taking their side. Sometimes what they have to say did not take great effort to come up with. Sometimes they say what they say because they're what they appear to be, and it's a thing that is criminal or otherwise unacceptable.
Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance comes to mind, but my issue with that is who gets to decide what is intolerant? I don't like the idea of some unelected board or career politician deciding what is suitable for me to read or view.
I strongly believe that one of those principles should be that hate speech is intolerable and unacceptable. And yes, there are grey areas in determining what is hate speech (this isn't a silver bullet that removes all need for human judgement and discussion), but there are also very large areas that are not grey in any way, shape, or form.
... Might contain a grain of historical truth; might, in any case, give people to think why do they know
what they think they already know.
Perhaps we'll be able to set up elaborate simulations one day to see how things play out.
If Hitchens had said, "I've weighed the two potential worst cases against each other, and I believe that the harms of protecting Holocaust denial are something that we can all live with", then I'd consider it a valid opinion. As it is, this quote strikes me as shallow and poorly thought out.
He's reduced a complex balance to a simplistic decision by excluding any input from the people at the most risk of harm. If he were Jewish, I doubt he'd have written that paragraph. The strongest advocates of unrestricted speech always seem to be those who have the least at risk, and the risk to others seems completely invisible despite their supposed attachment to hearing from everybody. He's taken refuge in exactly the opposite "false security of consensus".
The argument comes from a place of privilege, is egregiously reductionist, and completely ignores simple precepts like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.
"I'm not a proponent of unlimited free speech. It's those grey areas that concern me. Like, using Hitch's example, is holocaust denial hate speech or an incitement to violence? Under certain circumstances, I imagine it would be. It's easy for me to say it should be allowed because I know the majority of society right now would dismiss their claims, but at what point (in terms of the percentage of society) would I start to feel uneasy about the idea being discussed? Is it better then to censor it outright? What if, as Hitch says:
... Might contain a grain of historical truth; might, in any case, give people to think why do they know
what they think they already know.
The problem, as I see it, isn't even about incitement to violence. There's plenty of Holocaust denial that isn't an incitement to violence, unless by stretching that term far past its breaking point. It's not even really hate speech, in a strict reading of that term -- it only becomes defined as "hate speech" because we know that it originates from people who have had more explicit hate speech restricted.
But that doesn't mean it's without harm. These "questions" are really assertions that rather than being killed en masse, Jews have in fact inflicted great deception on the world. That creates mistrust -- sometimes violent, but more often merely prejudicial. Those prejudices can take effect in myriad ways, impossible to trace to the questioner, but nonetheless real.
Would a smart person like Hitchens be fooled by this? Surely not. But then again, he doesn't even seem to consider that it's a possibility. As you say, he seems to think that violence is the only way harm could be inflicted, and nothing else seems to be involved. That's a blind spot.
That blind spot is important here, because his entire argument is based on "Let people make their arguments and surely we'll come to the right conclusion". I don't believe he himself is capable of coming to the right conclusion because he's missing something right in front of him -- something somebody must surely have pointed out at some point, but which he doesn't even consider to be a problem worth mentioning.
Every single ideology will say their opponents are responsible for countless lives lost. (And if they lump everyone who disagrees with them together can probably make such a case) Just for an example, capitalism vs communism. I'd rather not be stuck in a China like situation where arguing against government beliefs like "this new virus in Wuhan is nothing to worry about citizen" gets censored or we get eternally stuck in a suboptimal state because arguing for anything different is considered dangerous.
I'll also point out that the deciders in Twitter, Facebook, etc are not the most ideologically diverse bunch, so one could argue that the so-called blue tribe is being the central arbiter.
i'm uncomfortable with the guidelines for that responsibility being decided upon by a third party corporation rather than a state/country level government regulator.
these guidelines are what dictate the citizens perceived reality in many cases; is it sane&safe to compel corporations with biased motivations to be the ones who decide on that perceived reality?
Personally I disagree with corporations controlling thought and dissent; I believe it to be outside of their scope, and I think that their acting as moral judge is both biased and dangerous to society-at-large -- this isn't to say I disagree with the control, I disagree with who is at the reins and what their (probably temporary) priorities may be at the time of control.
I share your discomfort, but I'm even more uncomfortable with government doing it. At least Youtube has a few alternatives. My national government? Not so much. (I mean, yeah, but I have to leave the country to get them...)
Free thought is the gateway to a healthy educated population.
Porn on YouTube cannot exist, legally, in the same way your ideal scenario implies.
A ban on underage rape videos followed by hiring mods to enforce this would have been doing it right.
I'm surprised they made that choice it must have been the most profitable path. I guess the producers left are the big businesses who create premium streams who pornhub can upsell to.
Did they kill their brand?
I have no idea if pornhub as a site would be as successful without it’s unverified model in the beginning.
It has gotten to the point where it is affecting everyone, no matter the content.
They just happen to be one of the most aggressive ones and the best part is they frequently change 'The Algorithm' which is a nickname for YouTube's 'recommendation's engine' to enforce this. Thus, the smaller creators are meant to lose against the established channels (Which are the TV, cable networks)
Lots of other benefits to this model - names that people don't get trapped in extremist bubbles as much when they're not literally banned from everywhere else.
EDIT: This happened to me thrice. I got 3 temp-bans from /pol/ for having politics the mods didnt like.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-tu...
It's far from entirely uncensored.
> Fans were arguing online about the best order to watch the episodes, and the 4chan poster wondered: If viewers wanted to see the series in every possible order, what is the shortest list of episodes they’d have to watch? [...] In less than an hour, an anonymous person offered an answer — not a complete solution, but a lower bound on the number of episodes required. [...] The proof slipped under the radar of the mathematics community for seven years — apparently only one professional mathematician spotted it at the time, and he didn’t check it carefully. [...] Then Robin Houston, a mathematician at the data visualization firm Kiln, and Jay Pantone of Marquette University in Milwaukee independently verified the work of the anonymous 4chan poster [1].
This example tells us a few things. One is that 4chan has users who can come up with new complicated mathematical proofs in a matter of hours. Two - that there are professional mathematicians who read 4chan and can spot those proofs.
Also anecdotally, but on two separate occasions I accidentally discovered that a "smart and well-adjusted" person I know lurks on 4chan. In one such instance the response was similar to "reddit is where dumb people try to act smart, while 4chan is where smart people try to act dumb". I think there is at least some truth in that.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-help...
Of course, this requires big tech to relinquish their power to shape worldwide discourse, which is unlikely to happen voluntarily.
More importantly, it doesn't solve the other problem: I don't want to use a website that supports a certain ideology or promotes dangerous content. So the website operator needs to have some sort of serverside moderation otherwise part of the community will not comfortable using it.
Some imageboards use both system, a client-side taglist that hide undesirable comment, and some "server-side" rules about what is generally allowed. I don't think client-side only moderation is sufficent
Instead of Reddit’s “news” subs banning the pulse night club shooting, you have “popular tastemakers” driving the list doing the same.
Except probably with less transparency or accountability. When /r/news bans a topic, I know roughly which couple of clowns did it, when I never see something because my list-makers pre-decided I shouldn’t, we’ll, who ever are those people?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/698821/influence-offensi...
> What kind of videos can I upload?
>> We accept any type of video content as long as it does not contain:
>>> Pornography or obscene material
>>> Copyrighted content (unless you own all the necessary rights)
>>> Hate or graphically violent acts
4chan sucks because it is too moderated in everything but the speech.
I would prefer just having rules about what speech is allowed or not and then give users full capability to use the site. Twitter does this pretty well.
>I would prefer just having rules about what speech is allowed or not
I'm not sure if you're serious. 4chan has an incredibly tiny amount of rules, one of them being no racism outside of /b/. Half of the forums are constantly bombarded by anti-black, anti-asian and anti-jewish racism. These posts do not get removed.
There are billions of videos hosted outside of YouTube. YouTube is not trying to get them taken down.
Why don't you complain when your favorite news channel fails to include a Communist guest pundit? Because it's their medium and they have editorial control.
I do believe in "the marketplace of ideas", even for ideas I don't hold (how else is one to rethink things?) But without agreed upon facts and, dare I say it, truths, such a marketplace can't really operate. We unfortunately are living in such times.
If they had competition, they would not be able to get away with having no customer support. The fact their customer support (which any other company like theirs would have) is practically non-existent is proof that they are using their monopoly position to the detriment of their customers who have no choice but to use them. It’s the same as them raising their prices. Except what they do instead is instead of explicitly raising prices, they cut services so that they are themselves more and more profitable. This is a direct result of their monopoly.
YouTube and other Google properties needs to be regulated by the government. They need to reinstate competent customer support and have a viable appeal system that isn’t a black hole. They need to be explicit with what constitutes a strike or a violation, and they need to be more effective in combatting fraudulent notices of copyright violation.
Sorry if I'm asking the obvious, but I'm not a content creator on YT.
Make an uproar on social media for their unjustifiable action and they would reverse it.
We should be promoting these alternatives rather than complaining to tech giants that will never change or keep repeating the same 'mistakes' or 'accidents' all over again.
In the case of BitChute, I think it'd merely be funny if RWW and possibly some other left-leaning channels decided to post there just to stick it to Google. Otherwise it's both a dumpster fire in terms of content and what they offer technologically speaking. They've made tons of promises over the years and never delivered. (it used to use WebTorrent, and they promised streaming years ago and that never happened either)
If they complain to YouTube, that they got their channel de-platformed again, for no reason other than 'The guidelines', I'm just going to laugh anyway.
Just recently, another user on HN got a suspension notice on their YouTube account without warning. They would be wise not to go with YouTube again and find another alternative [0]
And No, Vimeo is not even an option for some creators. [1]
It would be extremely hypocritical of them.
What we really need, I think, are options. Peertube seems like a good one.
Should there be a certain size threshold after which they can't claim "private" anymore? It has a huge effect on society.
> What we really need, I think, are options
Yes, but they don't want to allow those options to exist. It's not in their interest.
All this said, if YT would vanish from the internet I'd be devastated. So many technical talks that are not mirrored anywhere else, great courses, hobby stuff, documentaries, not to mention the breadth of music. Together with Wikipedia and arXiv I think it's one of the fundamental resources of the internet. And the content is, like Google search, generated by the users, it's our work.
Does that still qualify as "private" when it gets to hoard so much of our creations? Is it their right to assert their massive size and power against content creators who are many and small, and can't coordinate to mount a meaningful opposition?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio...
https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/140949874315881267...
Of course... another 'Accident' as all ways with these tech companies with dangerous levels of power.
I can't believe that they can just sit there and 'trust' these tech giants because they 'think' that they are on their side.
They can do it to anyone for any reason and they were already rejecting their appeals (Because of the guidelines). Probably will happen again to someone else previously banned. Like I said before, they are not you friends; accident or not. On the side of profit.
To Downvoters: What alternatives do you suggest to move away from platforms like YouTube and to avoid these so called 'accidents' from happening?
How on earth do you continue to trust these platforms by tech giants to not flag your account because of another 'accident'? This is not the first time this has happened and it will only get worse unless you find an alternative.
Don't take my word for it, this user [1] RIGHT NOW on HN has their YouTube channel suspended, for NO REASON, other than "The guidelines". [1] It will only get worse and worse for everyone.
[0] https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/140949874315881267...
> Has anyone else noticed that most complaints like this about Youtube's moderation fail Hanlon's razor? I'm just not sure I believe these type of conspiracies that attribute specific and nefarious reasons for these moderation decisions.
> It is natural to try to see patterns in the moderation, but I think the largest pattern is that there is little pattern. They instead have an job that is impossible to do at the scale they do it at the budget they do it at.
Perhaps, we should have size limits for such platforms as well?
buying into the sourest, meanest, most anti-corporate party line is ultra popular. but I think Hanlon's describes things well. there is enormous difficulty applying tasteful moderation at scale.