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Comment by ddingus | Hacker News Reader

Of course they are!

That's how this goes. Once the door is open for censorship, it all works just like lies do, and it's often associated with lies and or hurt egos, say lack of acceptance and respect, and it tends to spread, until it's ridiculous.

And let's get real here: This whole mess is because the government and big media don't like being near constantly ratioed.

They do have the option of improving how they work and what they say, but maybe they feel it is easier to just try and hide the problems. People went away from broadcast because of this crap, and reproducing it online means people will go somewhere else again.

What it won't do is transform things into being reputable.

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YouTube is on the side of profit, so is now moderating its platform like the large media companies who have moved in from TV/Cable to also using YouTube. The creators and users are always last place.

As I said days before, [0] it will only get worse and YouTube will not change.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29407822

Not reputable.[1] And that's OK, expected. [not OK as in, I approve, because I just don't. OK in being aware and acting reasonably and prudently]

Best move is to use it with eyes wide open and continue to seek options for news, commentary, matters of importance.

At some point, "profit", being a higher priority than people, and their needs / interests, isn't going to end well. Never does. To me, the question is all about the timeline and where I'm at personally when it does seriously shift.

[1] And I do not mean to denigrate anyone or YT frankly. See my other comments. It's a rough world. Seriously,

One nit to pick on your otherwise fine point:

Profit means playing ball with entities that can very seriously impact the enterprise. The money is great, but the cost to everyone is YT and friends doing some bidding they would otherwise want to avoid.

Essentially, it's similar to the military industrial complex. Private extension of government, and big business always does this. Has to, or the real threat might be accumulating soft power, the hearts and minds of the people,

Just saying it's not all money here. Power, and I mean established power, is a factor here as well. Corruption is legal here, and in many parts of the world. What we are seeing now is a part of that playing out.

If we were to have some real conversations, perhaps over beers, in a trust type scenario, I'll bet a whole lot of people in tech get this, have no answers, and would prefer it go much differently. We all know how this stuff can empower people, really improve the world.

That's not changed. But there are things in the way.

Corruption is not legal. It is simply the apparent norm that we have come to expect from our elected officials, bureaucrats, journalists, courts, police, and many other occupational classes. And when in Rome….

Corruption is absolutely legal. For example, the revolving door between regulatory agencies and large businesses, insider trading by Congress members, large government contracts (especially in the military) being awarded not to the best companies bidding but the ones that will employ people in a given politicians district, and so on. All corruption, all legal and normalized. Many are just trained not to see it as corruption.

Corruption may be the de facto standard operating procedure for the majority of government, but that does not make it legal. However, being illegal does not mean that we the people stand a snowball’s chance in hell of draining that swamp.

Ironic, because what made them popular was community content. Now that media producers use their platform, it has to cleaned up in the interest of advertisers. Youtube kids (what a horrible idea) for everyone. I really hope for a new alternatives taking root. I don't want TV 2.0 and the content of established media on Youtube is lacking to say the least.

The evidence presented in this video isn't anywhere near enough to confirm that this is actually true, yet you're already offering up speculative explanations about google's intentions as if it's all a foregone conclusion and you know exactly why. I think that's a little weird.

When it comes to censorship, I think at best it doesn't really matter why, and at worst it's fair to assume mal intent, even if it's not obvious or provable. Otherwise (and without an affirmative reason), why hide it?

That's the nature of censorship.

But especially so when the "alpha testing" is specifically done on videos of the new White House administration.

Unless you're questioning whether removing the downvotes qualifies as censorship at all. Which I would find a little weird.

What hypothetical "pure" intentions would you suggest are possibilities?

> When it comes to censorship, I think at best it doesn't really matter why

Your "censorship" framing is just a speculative assumption. There is no proof that censorship is going on here.

> What hypothetical "pure" intentions would you suggest are possibilities?

There are billions of comments on YouTube and anyone who actually works in software understands that software very often does things that the programmers didn't intend, and I'm not even talking about ML which is literally statistically applied logic, i.e. the wrong thing happening is inevitably assured and assumed from the start.

This whole argument is moot anyway, there's no commercial incentive to hire a legion of moderators because for all that extra money spent they'd simply be accused of bias even if the moderation was actually fair, a statistic of which there is literally no trusted party to arbiter.

I'm taking about hiding downvotes and selectively disabling comments. (Ignoring for now the selective hiding of particular comments or blacklisted words)

That's hiding information that's normally available due to the nature of the content. That's censorship.

Bingo. Censorship opens the door to all of these questions.

Censorship is bad, even if done for the right reasons.

Who says we are constrained to this video?

This matter is a running conversation.

If you can present evidence that YouTube is deleting comments that criticize the removal of the dislike button then I'll retract my skepticism of your comment and endorse it myself.

From my perspective, there is a least considerable evidence that what you're saying is not true, consider for just one example, the entire comment section on the very video this thread is about.

Here you go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43wp_EUk2ho

Check the comment section of that video.

For what? Burden is on you here, due to your position in the conversation.

What are we looking for? Why does it matter?

The entire comment section is full of comments criticizing the removal of the dislike button.

Yeah?

I see 'em. Have seen them elsewhere too. I didn't see anyone saying ALL comments were being removed, did you?

Now, before we go farther down this road, there is a lot going on. YT, and others, are doing many things to nudge, bias, favor, some speech over other speech. Not all of those make sense. Some are offensive. Others make sense.

These actions in general, and the low transparency related to them, as well as some overt and excessive actions, bans, demonetization, etc... are very highly objectionable. That's where I am at on it.

And I'm going to stay there, until such time as the burden I put up thread is met in a compelling way.

Some are saying these things are just unfortunate artifacts from necessary actions, I do not agree.

Cheers, I've got other things to do, but I did enjoy this conversation.

You've the last word, and I'll read with interest.

> I didn't see anyone saying ALL comments were being removed, did you?

It's very convenient for your argument that you can dismiss all the evidence that directly contradicts the claim as stated. Seems to me like this is made up outrage by somebody reading signs in tea leaves.

The important distinction is the type of user making the complaint. A youtube partner gets their comments deleted whereas random people don't. It would then go without saying, the larger the voice the more scrutiny it may receive.

All I'm seeing from your responses however is just intellectual laziness, borderline concern trolling and trying to mostly defend anti-American actions from a large American corporation. I'm not sure what your goal is, but I don't think you're having this discussion in good faith.

You're also asking for proof of censorship, I'm not sure if you understand how what you ask literally would be nearly impossible to provide because it would be censored. It would have to have you go on and trust to some degree that something was said.

If you want to go about arguing with your "strongly intellectual" mindset you're going to have a rough time being able to comprehend counter intuitive discussions involving the destruction of the very evidence you're trying to discuss.

A bunch of bloviating nothing-speak sprinkled with accusations, name-calling, and speculation about what's in my head. Spare me.

Well, there we go!

Seriously, and with due respect, I do not need your endorsement. In the court of public opinion, it's all about the passers by and how this conversation plays out over an extended amount of time. You have put your thoughts here, as have I and we both get to do that!

Bonus: Seems a reasonable conversation. I like those.

My perspective is that of a student of corruption, these general dynamics over a broad range of contexts. There are some basic truisms in play here that speak very strongly to the opinion I expressed.

That's why I lead with, "of course they are", because "that is how these things go."

Time tested, production proven basic wisdom right there. Our history is littered with this crap, and the tech, context, etc... will change, but the humans really don't.

This is a human issue, not a technical one.

You've written a lot of vague platitudes about corruption, but have offered no evidence to support your speculation.

I don't need to.

The technical arguments are not sufficiently compelling to undermine the entirely obvious transition to a more big media friendly model in progress.

Further, I'm on the solid majority opinion on all this.

To get past that requires proponents show people need this to be done, they are better off, and that somehow they will be better informed, see more value.

Not gonna happen.

> I don't need to

Ok. Obviously you don't need to do anything, but presenting evidence for a claim when asked is a pretty basic standard for discussion around here. Peace out.

We do not have an absolute here. Time will tell.

You want hard facts on political and power motivated behaviors. Over time, as I said, we will learn more.

And hey, I could be wrong. That will come out too.

It's intellectually lazy arguing. They're basically trying to take the position of "It's not real until you can have a scientific or political consensus by APPROVED thought leaders."

It's a chicken and egg issue. You can assume if you have an egg you'll eventually get a chicken, but he's saying "you don't know that 'for sure'" until the chicken hatches. It's just feels like concern trolling.

Noted and filed away for the future.

Thanks. That makes sense.

Please don't speak for me, your explanation of my position is totally off base.

> They're basically trying to take the position of "It's not real until you can have a scientific or political consensus by APPROVED thought leaders."

This is a bizarre and bad faith summary of my position. I have made no statements about "approved thought leaders". What I said is that evidence has not been provided for the claim that YouTube is deleting comments for criticism of hiding the dislike button. I understand that you believe this to be true implicitly and that no evidence is needed to make the claim, but I reject the suggestion that your claim doesn't need evidence. Lacking evidence, you lash out and label me a troll... a foreboding omen for the possibility of civil discussion.

I literally provided you evidence of it happening. I guess that wasn't the evidence you're looking for hence "approved thought leaders". If it doesn't come from specific sources for you it's not relevant or "evidentiary".

Go back to reddit.

I hope that the slippery slope is not real, and it doesn't get to the point where comments such as yours get deleted across all platforms, but I fear I'm wrong.

If Youtube views were really upvote/downvote driven, and if democracies were really vote-driven, if we actually listened to people’s vote instead of telling them what they should think… the world would be much, much different.

We would actually listen to the People.

No, that’s clearly not the world we want. Bring on those “crowd shaping tools.

(Edit: Removed the middle paragraph).

Indeed, but adding to the problem in this egregious way should be called out and the reputability of those involved questioned.

Might not do a lick of good. That's OK.

I can, at a minimum, gauge who to trust, who I am working with. A short conversation says a lot. And that's enough to manage what I do, say, risk, reward.

Maybe that is as good as it all can get right now. Maybe not. Real people having real conversations is a path forward though. More people than ever are seeking that having seen the mess you describe unavoidably. The illusion was better before. Now it's all sort of overt, in our face.

>"No, that’s clearly not the world we want."

Who is "we"? Obviously not the people from the rest of your message.

> if democracies were really vote-driven,

It’s interesting that let’s go Brandon has become a thing for the most popular president. Why didn’t it happen before?

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