YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips | Hacker News Reader

YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips

boingboing.net

682 pointsPretzelFisch587 comments

There is a massive YouTube and Instagram industry of outright faking craft and cooking tips. They're not just bad or a stretch, they're intentionally fabricated, made at scale by TheSoul Publishing with 550 employees. That's because making cool things looking surprisingly easy goes viral way better than actual reality-grounded instructions, and for the adtech giants nothing matters except the number of clicks.

Before people realize that they can't really make a 3-layer cake in a toaster, the fakers already cash in on the views. Usually the risk of these faked craft hacks is just cut fingers and kitchen fires, but the "just grab 2000V, it's so easy!" videos take it to another level of lethality.

> Before people realize that they can't really make a 3-layer cake in a toaster

Our 12-year-old recently tried to make himself "cheese on toast" by putting both cheese and uncooked bread into the (almost brand new, upright) toaster. Aaargh!

Cue the house full of smoke, a stern reprimand, then a couple of hours of my time wasted on removing every last piece of burnt greasy cheese from inside the toaster, followed by several empty runs with it outside to let it get properly hot and burn off the last of the fatty residues.

He was, at least, quite sheepish about his learning experience.

At the risk of sounding like a salesperson, I'd like to mention a feature of basic/classic Dualit toasters - namely, the optional and elegantly simple sandwich cage. [1] The cage is designed to take two slices of bread with a filling (in my usage, always heavy on the cheese). You put this into the toaster slot, which is vertical, and safely make cheese/whatever toasties. So, your 12-year-old had the right idea, but not the right toaster.

FWIW, and now going full salesperson, Dualit toasters are low-tech and minimalist. The timer is clockwork. There is no automatic pop-up function; you can depress a lever to raise the toast during cooking to check its colour, if you like. All parts are serviceable/replaceable. I've had my bog-standard Dualit (plus two cages) for 20+ years, and so far I've not had to replace even a heating element; and this with usage at least five days a week.

[1] https://www.dualit.com/products/original-sandwich-cage

I would note the parent comment appeared to have been talking about an open faced sandwich, i.e. cheese topping on a slice of toast.

Even if I'm incorrect and a closed grilled cheese sandwich was the culprit, a toaster oven would still be a better suggestion in my opinion!

When I was reading the GP comment, I immediately thought of the Dualit toaster. I'm not at all affiliated with them, but I own the classic as well as this sandwich cage and I cannot recommend it enough. They are expensive, but user-serviceable parts means that everything broken can be easily replaced from the logic board to the heating elements.

I think we should support companies that not only support right to repair, but look towards quality and longevity of their products. Dualit makes the case. Bonus points that their classic series are hand built in-house!

It's a fun idea, but I must say I have discovered quite by chance that an inexpensive toaster oven is the tool for this job - as well as countless other jobs.

Not just toasting bruschetta - it's secretly a $60 patio oven, opening the door to things like baking fish mid-July without heating or smelling up the house.

Generally I'm salty at people going full sales mode. But this time? I'm not even mad

Sandwich cages are the kind technological solution people in general just have something of a blind spot against. Made myself a note if I decide to buy a toaster when I move next year

Ah, the wonders of technology and engineering :)

But DOES IT MAKE FRACTAL PATTERNS ON THE TOAST?!?

How do you deal with the dripping cheese part? I’m guessing a tray at the bottom you need to clean?

I've been looking for a toaster that works as well as the ones made 60 years ago. And for once, a marketing page has me convinced to pry open my wallet.

But there is no link or button anywhere on the page that tells me how to buy one. :(

I want to give a shoutout to a similar but much nerdier design, which is no longer sold. Kenmore (rebadged as De'Longhi) used to make a single long-slot toaster with an adjustable width all the way out to about 2 inches. I have one. The heat element isn't amazing, and it, like the Dualit, is manual lift with a timer. But critically, you can move the toaster elements manually together or away from one another with a lever on the top of the toaster. In other toasters, the elements are fixed in position regardless of the bread width. As a result, this toaster is amazing for big thick hand-cut slices of bread. And no need for a sandwich cage at all: you can put entire hoagies in there.

A picture: https://www.lowes.com/pd/De-Longhi-2-Slice-Aluminum-Toaster/...

The clockwork timer on mine broke, so I bought a replacement and repaired it.

I bought it in Europe so it was 220v. When I moved to the US I purchased 110v heater elements and swapped them out.

It's metal, held together with screws, and toasts bread. It's perfect.

Ha. I knew the influencers would eventually make their way to Hacker News.

But seriously won't the cheese drip out the bottom?

This morning I was making toast in my cheapo toaster and was reminded of the Dualit a customer brought in last year for me to repair. The date code was 1997 and it sounded like it was the first heating element replacement it had needed in that time. I thought the one side/two side heating element switch was particularly clever.

Honestly I was just impressed that the parts were available. Most consumer-grade toasters use nearly-identical mechanisms, with zero available replacement parts (maybe a crumb tray if you're lucky).

> There is no automatic pop-up function

That's a bit too low tech for me, but otherwise looks like a solid device :D

Even with the cage I'd be worried that the content could still slip into the toaster.

I'll keep using my toaster-oven for that.

They sell uncaged vertical toasters?!?!?

There's no electrocution risk with that?

A story from an academic summer camp where I used to work:

In the dining hall one morning, a teacher sees three kids putting ice cubes into the toaster. The teacher walks up to them. Two of the kids dash away, leaving the third to fend for herself.

Teacher: "What are you doing?"

Student: "Putting ice cubes into the toaster."

Teacher: "Why would you do that?"

Student: "To see what would happen."

Teacher: "Okay. Let's think about this. What happens to ice when it gets hot?"

Student: "It melts?"

Teacher: "Yes, it melts into water. And what happens when you put water into an electronic device like a toaster?"

Student: "...it goes boom?"

Teacher: "So should you put ice into the toaster?"

Student: "No."

Teacher: "Thank you."

This is a camp explicitly for gifted & talented students, by the way. They are exceptionally talented in many ways, but they're still 11 years old.

> This was a camp explicitly for gifted & talented students, I might add

Believe me, they're the worst ;)

My son recently got on the wrong train to get home from school, it was one that was "fast" that is it doesn't stop in the place where we live, his train sailed straight through our station and the next several stations, before it finally stopped somewhere and he got off.

At this point he (rightly) whipped out his phone and called me for help/advice. I checked the train timetables, figured out that although I could have gone and picked him up in the car, it would actually be quicker - and perhaps a learning experience - for him to get the train back.

So, I told him "go to platform X and get the train at HH:MM and it will bring you home".

He went to platform X, but unwisely got on the first train which arrived, which unfortunately was a delayed - fast(!) - service. So, he ended up going in the other direction on a fast train - and (again) not stopping - straight through our station, until his train eventually reached somewhere it did stop at.

At this point he phoned me in tears. I got in the car and drove there to pick him up.

We filed that under "learning experience". We seem to be having plenty of them...

When I was 10 or 11 on a camping trip I watched an adult make sopaipillas, on a propane camp stove no less. So the morning after I get home I get up at 6AM and try to recreate the recipe from memory. My mom is a bit a of health nut, so for flour I used the whole-wheat we had available and instead of a frying oil I used olive oil. I turned on the gas stove and smoked the entire 2000sqft two story house out with a grease and burning dough fire.

Even if a video I could watch online was available in the 1990s, the recipe would still fail no matter how safe the instructions were because I misunderstood the base concepts. My mom taught me safety in the kitchen afterwards.

I was that 12-year-old. My brain still works this way when tackling novel problems.

If I may suggest, instead of reprimands (I'd imagine your kid knows they'd messed up and won't try this experiment again), use these situations to teach your child about forming hypotheses, questioning assumptions and doing reality checks before starting an experiment.

Waffle iron. It's a horizontal toaster and applies enough pressure to cook faster. Leaves cool marks.

Just don't burn yourself! (Technically applies to the toaster as well though)

Horizontal sandwich toasters are the popular kind of toasters around my parts. It can make from plain toasts to fully stuffed sandwiches and are not that hard to clean either. I guess Americans will consider them more as a grill though.

Same as a panini press. We've never owned a toaster, which seem weird to some. We use our panini press instead. It's a flat model without any grill marks. Easy to clean and makes perfectly even toast.

> Our 12-year-old recently tried to make himself "cheese on toast" by putting both cheese and uncooked bread into the (almost brand new, upright) toaster. Aaargh!

I know it's tempting to blame modern technological monstrosities for this nonsense, but kids were lighting toasters on fire before the internet.

Source: lit a toaster on fire, prior to the January 1983 IPv4 migration on the ARPANET (and long before I knew what any of that meant).

I don't think anyone was blaming modern technology, or anything specific, for this nonsense?

I've been putting cheese in the vertical toaster my whole life… he just did it wrong.

You have to put 2 slices of bread, cheese in between, and of course take it out before it all starts burning.

Pro tip: position your cheese slice as per leaving some margin at the bottom of the toast and press that zone.

You are not alone. Moreover, I was honestly thinking that was the way _everybody_ did it.

Toaster pockets! A whole new world of bread-related experiments awaits.

We had an employee who once tried cooking bacon in a toaster oven and it caught on fire. Filled the office with smoke, so it happens.

Well then this employee must've done it wrong, because I cook bacon in my toaster over (and now an air fryer) all the time.

However, you do need a tray on which the bacon sits, which was perhaps your employee's mistake.

> a couple of hours of my time wasted on removing every last piece of burnt greasy cheese from inside the toaster

I'm not (currently) a parent, so this may be off base, but I am currently in the crunch part of the process so looking to learn:

Is there not a better opportunity for this to be a learning experience by making it a couple of hours of your kid's time to do that cleaning? I know my adult life has benefited from my parents' insistence that I clean up my own messes, and 12-year-olds are certainly capable of generating elbow grease.

Yes and no. Punishing your kid for some dumb but innocent action has the potential to make them too cautious. Additionally, they might damage the toaster because they have no experience on how to properly open and clean it and that would make things much worse. That's especially true if your kid might be neuro-divergent - e.g. kids with ADHD tend to be clumsy but cannot help it, they might be 30% behind in motor coordination. So your 12yo might have the eye-hand coordination of a 7-8yo, and I would not let a kid that age clean a toaster on their own.

IMO, the best course of action would be to not ridicule or reprimand them but explain how this wasn't the best course of action and then clean the toaster together with the kid - that way they learn how to do it and don't feel like an idiot. And you don't have to fume over what your kid did wrong but spend some time together.

Obviously, if your kid actually IS dumb and reckless, things would be different.

As cleaning a toaster most likely involves sticking things into it (like a brush, maybe even a knife to scrape off the burnt stuff) and you also don't want your kids to stick stuff (especially metal) into a toaster, I'd say it's safer to skip the "elbow grease" lesson in this special case.

Kudos for not just throwing away the toaster. Will have benefited the learning experience.

About ten years ago, I bought one of those small countertop toaster ovens that is roughly big enough for four pieces of bread to lie flat in it. It became the best $100 I've ever spent. We cook everything small enough to fit in it, including toast with cheese :) . We've since only used our regular full-size oven maybe half as often, because this small countertop one is so much faster and more convenient

No need for an actual toaster, although this one takes a minute or two longer. As an added bonus, my mother-in-law hates waiting that extra minute or two, so that's a big win in my book.

> then a couple of hours of my time wasted on removing every last piece of burnt greasy cheese from inside the toaster

Do you have a fancy toaster? I wouldve just replaced mine, although mine is pretty basic

Ahhh, yea did that as a kid too. Although, I tipped it on its side. The trick was to make toast then microwave the cheese :)

But seriously, my mom was furious. No YouTube required.

> then a couple of hours of my time wasted on removing every last piece of burnt greasy cheese from inside the toaster

Should have been a couple of hours of his time

As annoying as that is, these kinds of events are very helpful for young folks.

That's how we learn.

I still do dumb stuff all the time, it's just more complicated dumb stuff :D

But at least it is complicated and -novel- dumb stuff.

If you lie the toaster on it's side it works.

You can buy reusable toaster bags that make this possible.

All sorts of crumbly, melty things can go in a standard upright toaster.

Did he learn it from YouTube or some other social media?

If so, why is he on there unsupervised?

Here is a hack for extremely fast grilled cheese.

Basic idea is to make the components separately:

1) toast two pieces of bread until they are dry and quite brown, this is important (to remove the water ) so that the bread does not heat up in the microwave

2) while it is toasting, cut up cheese for each slice, I use quarter inch thick 1“ x 2“ pieces, usually four per slice

3) after the bread is toasted, put them on a glass plate and butter them, then cover each with the slices of cheese

4) microwave 30s until the onset of melting

5) optional to add cold deli meat the sandwich after microwaving and combining

6) cut into fours and serve with optional dipping sauce

The dry toast and the melted cheese have a very good texture and taste and it takes about 3 minutes to make.

I make this for children often and add a bunch more cheese and meat so that four pieces of toast can be the main part of a simple lunch for 8 kids (each cut into quadrants).

Just the other day youtube suggested me this cutsie "what to do with old microwaves" video that just had the corporate jingle music over a video of a guy building various things out of microwave transformers without any kind of narration or warning of the danger.

Considering people are actually dying trying these microwave tricks, this is no longer a theoretical concern.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2UfglFeOH8 (much later the author added a warning saying this is for entertainment only)

"For entertainment only" is such a cop-out, do whatever dangerous thing and show step by step instructions but then slap on a "for entertainment only" on it so you're safe from legal repecussions.

> you're safe from legal repecussions.

Not necessarily: no way to tell whether it's sufficient until it actually goes before a court.

these are with a low voltage high current winding, instead of the standard 2000v winding, though, which is much safer. The danger of the unmodified microwave transformer isn't really so much that it has exposed mains voltage (although obviously you should be careful around that, too), but that it has 2000v+ and it's galvanically isolated, meaning no GFCI/RCD will save you (and obviously the 2000v will also do a much quicker job at passing lethal current through your heart/other organs)

Comparatively, a spot welder is "just" as dangerous as any other mains-based experiment. Not safe, but you have a pretty good shot at surviving, even if you get zapped.

I'm getting flashbacks of UnderDunn's home made battery spot welder built with a microwave transformer.

the dryness of the top comment is perfect

> Remember, if you've got lathes and welders and assorted tools and materials, don't throw out an old microwave because you can use part of it to make a wire hot.

exactly! Plus, they do throw out 98% of the microwave... just to save a clump of iron which is one of the more easily recycled materials. Admittedly, it's in layers with resin between, but I'm sure that resin will cook right off in the massive slag crucibles.

Child me figured out how to make a wire hot with a 9v battery. Why fuck with a HV transformer.

These videos are produced in giant production houses in China. That’s why there’s no voiceovers. They’re designed to be distributed in every language.

Salad is pretty dangerous and I don't see anyone putting disclaimers on cooking shows.

Contact with live microwave oven transform secondaries has about a 70% fatality rate, if we believe bigclivedotcom. Eating salad has about an 0.001% fatality rate.

Care to elaborate? I've been eating salad my whole life and I'm just fine. But then again, I also cook eggs with runny yolk, so I guess I'm just a renegade in the eyes of the food safety folks.

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic, or if you actually live in a country with poor safety standards on produce and it is a risk for food-borne diseases to eat uncooked food.

A glaring example of how the advertising business model incentives lead to the worst outcomes for everyone. People working at TheSoul Publishing literally waste their lives producing straight up harmful content and the consumers either get brainrot from watching it or risk serious injury and death from replicating it.

What incentives would you put into place?

Banning advertising (or using strong regulation to make it non-profitable) so that people can directly pay for the content they want to consume. Content that provides value will survive, clickbait and this kind of crap will die off since nobody would pay for fake crafts (and those who did will ask for a refund when they try replicating it and it doesn't work).

If YouTube leaves up the dangerous videos, but removes the videos warning of that danger, then they should definitely be held liable. This is literally the worst thing they can do. Doing nothing would be better.

Automated moderation is no excuse; they designed that moderation, and they did a really poor job of it if it leaves the dangerous videos alone but removed those warning of the danger.

It reminds me a bit of YouTube removing original content videos because of fraudulent copyright claims by Big Content, except this time people can actually die. YouTube needs to clean up its act and be held liable for this stuff.

Scary. I recently did some research into what's behind the 'Jungle Builders' channels (two guys pretending to build flashy, but completely dysfunctional, pools somewhere in a forest with little more than their hands as tools). Seems to be a similar scheme, it doesn't invite viewers to recreate, but they leave a lot of litter and moscito-infested concrete pits behind. Most of them are actually in the same tiny forest somewhere in Malaysia that looks like a v2 of the Banksy theme park now.

There is a whole genre of people building "by hand" underground pools and other crazy structures in the jungles. Aside from being terribly unsafe, if you look closely you can often see marks in the dirt from machine tools that they forgot to smooth away in the soft clay.

I think those are all knockoffs of the Primitive Technology channel.

Do you have some links to this? A few cursory quacks turned up nothing.

My family loves those channels but it would be interesting to see how the structures hold up and how/if they are ever used.

Here's one, although I don't like it because I feel like it's overdramatizing a bit. With construction quality this low, my hinge is that the jungle will claim back those spots fairly quickly, but the (drainless!) water pits will remain moscito breeders for a considerable amount of time (and wildlife trap hazards for some time).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCyLWhPnq1M

In response to your question: they hold up extremely poorly. But ecologically speaking, it's probably no worse than the average palm oil farm.

Can I ask what you tried searching? Because "Jungle Builders' channels" pulled it up immediately.

What I don't understand is the posting of these videos on Facebook by seemingly fake accounts. I'm in a bunch of yard sale groups and random unrelated accounts are constantly posting these hack and engineering type videos that are like 20 seconds of 50 different useless things with no explanations or other information. There's no ads displayed, there's nothing being sold or promoted and no links or way to find out more about the video.

Does anyone else experience this? How are they making money or why is this being done?

I guess my theory is somehow facebook rewards total views and then they are monetizing some other content.

> Does anyone else experience this? How are they making money or why is this being done?

Could they be building an audience to exploit later? IIRC, that's the tactic the Russian Internet Research Agency used -- build an audience with memes and cat pictures, then pivot to political propaganda.

> Does anyone else experience this? How are they making money or why is this being done?

I suspect these are trying to build reputation for the account posting them. The bizarre, inexplicable videos will get watched by a lot of users wondering WTF they are, which may cause further content posted by those accounts to be ranked higher in feeds.

The account can later be resold, used to post ads or even sell courses to become a "successful" social media influencer using the account's own metrics as selling points.

> the "just grab 2000V, it's so easy!" videos take it to another level of lethality.

The problem is, they're thinking too small. The 2kV supplies in microwaves aren't big enough.

If you used the PSU from an old single-digit-megawatts klystron TV transmitter, then you'd have about 50kV at 50A or so. Now this sounds dangerous, but believe it or not, this would be far safer to work with than a microwave transformer.

What, you don't believe me?

Of course it is! If you got a shock off it, your arm would vapourise long before your heart stopped!

This plausibly might not be sarcasm O_o

Not just fabricated for the views, but reactions too. For each debunking video, some will follow the actual videos to see how bad they are. But the viewer intention doesn't matter - clicks are clicks.

> Not just fabricated for the views, but reactions too

I regard videos which include the word "reacts" in the title as having a huge red flag.

The signal-to-noise on this junk content is simply appalling.

Seems like their DIY / craft vids have moved from glue guns to angle grinders and (tack) welding lately.

Anyone with even the smallest amount experience with either, know that these things are accidents bound to happen.

Dunno, I have used both since I was like 13. Also, we used to weld and do all sorts of things (acetylene torching, lathe, casting, grinding, sawing, milling) mostly unsupervised with very little instruction in middle/high school metal shop. I don't remember any accidents.

Hello, Mr. or Ms. Survivor Bias! I used to cut firewood with my father using a 3 foot buzz saw made over 100 years ago*, and had but only the most token of safety guards (ignore the giant power take-off belt that's just waiting to consume some of your loose clothing, and you with it), yet I still have all limbs, fingers, and toes!

And yet I still think it asinine to shrug shoulders and say, "I dunno, nobody I know ever got hurt, yuk, yuk, yuk." If one cannot see the potential for harm in such scenarios, you are one of those accidents waiting to happen.

*yes, really

Well if you got through high school without any accidents it must be a risk free activity...

Me, too. The class was called Agri-Mechanics, and it covered everything technical that farm boys were expected to do regularly.

Of course it's an unnecessary danger for the children of parents who would consider them failures if they grew up to work with their hands and backs.

Aren't lathes extremely dangerous?

Maybe you hit your head?

> and (tack) welding

To be fair, Gasless MIG is basically a glue gun for grown-ups.

… where the glue gun has orders of magnitude more power and speed and the “use electrical resistance to create heat” portion of the show necessarily happens OUTSIDE the housing. It’s a cute comparison but a MIG welder is a lot more dangerous than a glue gun.

"That's because making cool things looking surprisingly easy goes viral way better than actual reality-grounded instructions" <- I feel like this might be the soul of the whole "no code" movement and why it bugs me a bit.

There's also a lot of really really bad "electrical engineers" on YouTube, particularly from India I notice, who build stuff that runs directly off the mains with no isolation.

Oh and the anti 5G maniacs ripping people off for magic stickers

Reported them both and YT did nothing.

Yes. But also, since the giants do only the bare minimum of automated moderation with no oversight and no checks and balances, the systems are easy to game by bad actors.

See the example of someone on HN saying his wife lost Whatsapp account for reporting spam - the spammers probably retaliated from hundreds of fake accounts. Same with this youtube video. Same with people gettong reported az spam ehrn criticizing certain nations.

And the giants of course do not care, why would they.

> for the adtech giants nothing matters except the number of clicks

Yet another example why advertising is a cancer on society.

In a market not corrupted by advertising, this kind of garbage content wouldn't exist because nobody would pay for it since the content they show is false and misleading.

But with advertising, the payment is automatic, non-refundable and happens preemptively even if the person doesn't consume the majority of the content (sometimes a single click is enough), therefore it becomes more profitable to mass-produce fake content designed to solicit clicks rather than content that provides true value such as information or entertainment.

Ann Reardon's (subject of this article) channel calls out these other channels and she even tries to recreate these fake crafts to prove they are fake.

Yes! The fact that one of Ann Reardon's main interests is in debunking stupid/dangerous craft and cooking videos, and yet her video is the one getting taken down, is an important irony that seems lost on the author of the boingboing post, and many other commenters here.

My kids and I love watching her videos, especially for iron-stomach Dave eating whatever she cooks, and learning the occasional Australian slang ("<adjective> as" == "very <adjective>")

I feel sorry for Dave. How many times do you think he's come home to an absolute mess, weird kitchen smells and Ann has just mumbled something about YouTube?

She's definitely one of my favourites, and I have a copy of her cookbook that I use a lot.

Now I want to try to make a three layer cake in a toaster. I'm sure it can be done with the right technique and tools. Even if it's wildly impractical and will yield a tiny result.

Ann Reardon, the subject of this article, is a good scientist who's been debunking these 'food hack' videos for years. She eventually branched out into debunking other things like this.

I've always been impressed with her tenacity in challenging this sort of thing while also managing to educate and entertain. It must be soul destroying trying to fight this endless tide of misinformation, which is constantly boosted by the youtube algorithm.

Glad to see this comment. I'm a huge Ann Reardon fan, and her original video that got her into this "debunking" theme is still great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6abePkXncCM

Still, it's a little depressing that someone who made great, inspiring, detailed and actually feasible cooking/baking content found that they couldn't really pay the bills with that content, but instead it turned out that debunking all the BS on YouTube was a better way to actually get paid.

I see these constantly on instagram, and usually comment something skeptical, but it is drowned out beneath 500 comments of just heart and fire emoji’s. Maybe these recipes existing as just theoretical things you could do are enough for most people.

Wait until youtube recommends you to click on "How to start a fission reactor in your garage".

Just like the Radioactive Boy Scout. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn

The first man-made fission reactor was built in a squash court.

It's a good thing they removed the dislike button!

I thought it was just annoying that they're often on the top results of searches and thought of them as just digital clutter.

But for people to post outright dangerous and deadly instructions is negligent at best and I would say more accurately in the realm of manslaughter at least.

Even before this there was the bleach strawberries to make them white before using them video.

Ann Reardon has done a great job debunking all the stupid 5 minute crafts BS but it’s an uphill battle. YouTube being trash doesn’t help.

I just looked into it.. Ugh, this kind of content is just abysmal.

25 GLUE GUN HACKS YOU HAVE TO TRY

24 SIMPLE BEAUTY TRICKS TO MAKE YOU LOOK FABULOUS

https://www.youtube.com/c/5MinuteCraftsYouTube/

Who are the people watching this stuff? I assume it's largely women and parents, as a lot of the "hacks" are beauty or parenting related. I watched a few minutes and all the ideas were just... terrible? Ranging from silly to impractical to dangerous.

Stay At Home Mom is a massive market segment with a lot of purchasing decision power. Long-form advertising targeted at SAHMs is nearly as old as the advertising industry itself. This is just the next iteration.

Video does particularly well with this segment (as opposed to text) because of the nature of parenting and housekeeping -- lots of time spent on your feet with busy hands and occasionally available eyes. The same reason radio/long-form podcasting is popular with truckers. Or text with office workers (relatively speaking). It's entertainment you can engage with during work hours between or during tasks.

Soap opera of the YouTube era, you might be on to something!

Plenty of people hate this shit and still watch it because they got tricked. I watched (skimmed) like 12 videos yesterday trying to find a hack to locate my empty AirPods case. There’s apparently no way to do it but each video had a more infuriatingly false title than the last.

It would never even occur to me to watch a video on finding my AirPods case. Either there is an article or forum post for it, or I need to post a question on a forum, but no way am I sifting through the garbage that is YouTube.

they really invited that sort of thing by tossing the dislike count

I'm curious what theoretical mechanism might there be for an airpods case to be findable?

I sometimes find myself watching similar content for a bit like a kind of engineering "reality" show. no real goal in mind and absolutely no intention of doing any of the things though. Knowing now that they put out videos suggesting people mess with live transformers... i think im over it.

Children and ESLs. I personally tune in to see just how far they'll go this time.

Little kids. My 7 year old loves five minute craft videos.

If people are curious about these, the YouTube channel "How to Cook That" often does videos exposing the fake cooking tips.

5 minutes crafts should be illegal

Certainly there must be some kind of liability here. One could never air these kinds of instructional videos on TV.

As the defacto online video experience, YouTube has both become the FCC and NBC - both the governing body and the distributor, yet they take none of the risk and assume no liability of either.

TrikTok is not too far behind with those videos either

YouTube's moderation is ridiculous, and it demonstrates the problem Google has in general. They don't like paying actual people to moderate their sites, and rely on automated systems and bots to do everything for them. So, if there's ever an issue (or you have a bunch of scammers mass reporting you because you debunk their 'work'), then YouTube/Google seems to think you're the problem instead of the scumbags.

We need things to change here. We need Google to moderate their services properly, and we need these scammers to get arrested/sued/whatever for misleading info, and putting people's lives at risk.

What's beyond belief is that even the auto moderation is useless. I've cost count of how many video's I've seen the comment:

"It's finally here: someurl"

*On every single video comment*

Or: "(Username:Whatsapp±SOMENUMBER): Chat up for more info"

Again, on every comment. It seems like Youtube just doesn't care in the slightest to bothered with the most basic auto moderation of the most overtly obvious spam.

> We need things to change here. We need Google to moderate their services properly,

Human moderation isn’t perfectly consistent, either. It would be extraordinarily expensive to expect YouTube to have humans moderate everything manually.

What are people willing to give up in exchange for a human-moderated version of YouTube? Would we be okay if they charged a $3 “moderation fee” on every upload to cover the cost of paying someone to watch the video and evaluate how it fits YouTube’s rules? The big creators wouldn’t care, but the small time videos would immediately stop being uploaded and competitor websites would become popular overnight.

I don’t see demands for perfect human moderation of YouTube uploads as realistic in any way.

No one expects things to be perfect or that there will be no mistakes, but there's a whole lot of space between "perfect" and "braindead stupid".

The worst part isn't so much that mistakes get made, but the way those mistakes are dealt with, which is often a frustrating and silly experience.

> It would be extraordinarily expensive to expect YouTube to have humans moderate everything manually.

You could flip this around, however? Why is YouTube promoting videos that no responsible human has reviewed?

These videos don't just trip and fall into people's feeds. They're selected by YouTube's recommendation algorithm, presumably targeting maximum engagement. That decision is automated, but it's still an editorial decision -- it's not based on an objective, chosen criterion like "most recent" or even "most viewed."

This isn't how YouTube is currently structured (nor the other social media platforms), but I think it's fair to suggest that if a platform is in the business of picking and choosing winners, it should bear at least a moral responsibility for the content it promotes.

YouTube could set a views threshold to make manual reviews scale. My guess is 99% of what people watch is the top 0.1% most popular videos which makes things manageable.

Highly dangerous video seen by 5,000 people not a big deal. Highly dangerous video seen by 5,000,000 people is.

> Would we be okay if they charged a $3 “moderation fee” on every upload to cover the cost of paying someone to watch the video and evaluate how it fits YouTube’s rules? The big creators wouldn’t care, but the small time videos would immediately stop being uploaded and competitor websites would become popular overnight.

That would actually be pretty ideal - most consumers watch YouTube for the bigger channels and popular content anyway, so they would stay on the platform, which would validate that revenue model. The smaller producers and consumers would both leave, which would help build competitors to YouTube. The big producers who remain will be slightly disincentivized to spam low-quality videos (including those text-to-speech automated ones that some people here have found). And, Google will have no excuse for not using humans to moderate videos anymore (can't cite "cost concerns" when you're literally pricing it in).

Seems like a win-win-win to me.

> Human moderation isn’t perfectly consistent, either. It would be extraordinarily expensive to expect YouTube to have humans moderate everything manually.

Those aren't just random channels though, they are top youtube channels, surely they can manage to review the most popular ones at least...

And we're talking about tips which can make people die if they follow them, that's the most clear cut case, there's nothing opinion based.

There's just no excuses there.

> I don’t see demands for perfect human moderation of YouTube uploads as realistic in any way.

Then don't add the word "perfect."

I'd be happy with a law that said Youtube were responsible for people who hurt themselves copying videos which they were recommended which were wildly unsafe.

If the result of that is Google has to charge people a moderation fee for videos they then recommend, then fine, that's the cost we have to pay.

What about a $3 fee that automatically comes out of the ad revenue when your video exceeds $Arbitrary limit (they could start at 200,000 views to start with).

Moderation is very complicated especially since it can be subjective based on the background and skill level of who is watching the video. Would it be possible to crowd source this? For example, I could add a filter to my search saying exclude 'profanity' and videos with profanity would be removed. Or exclude videos that are 'dangerous' or 'for entertainment only' and those would be removed. My thought is that we should use the shear numbers of persons watching the videos to our advantage. Honestly, I sort of do this by looking at the comments since many times you can gather the flavor of the video based on the comments. This could also be used to political bias. Videos with a right-wing leaning would get tagged as leaning right and vice-versa. Also, content creators would be incentivized to accurately tag their videos and perhaps the algorithm could penalize content creators with discrepant self-tag versus what viewers tag as.

This case pretty clearly crosses the line into criminal negligence / manslaughter / murder. If they were are book publisher or TV network, someone at Google would be facing jail time.

The "moderation" for Shorts is just spectacular! And I don't mean good.

The amount of back-to-back "Hi I'm Elon Musk and I'm something something bitcoin something something..." deepfakes is astounding. There are a handful that are seemingly pixel for pixel identical, yet as much as you report them over and over again, they only seem to shown more and more.

Then there are the countless sexually inappropriate ones that also fills the stream.

The gruesome ones showing rats/mice getting spiked to death, animals suffering on the side of the road after they've been hit by a truck/bus/car, so on and so forth.

It's just horrible.

Okay, so assorted cryptocurrency scams have obvious financial incentives, and I assume the sexual ones are trying to get people onto a paid site. What's driving the animal gore videos? I can't think that there's anything to sell there; is it just people uploading stuff for the shock value?

Yeah, it's not just about moderation being automated, it's about automated moderation being based on crowdsourced flagging. The debunked will always have stronger incentives than the debunking. Actually the debunking don't even have any incentive to flag at all, because they require the scandal to vlog about. It's worse than the SEO battles.

Or instead use specialised communities that does do moderation like peer tube, odysee.

> we need these scammers to get arrested/sued/whatever for misleading info

Don't you think that it's the broadcaster that should be penalised? It is Goo/YT that is promulgating the misinfo. The scammers/creators would go away, if Goo/YT moderated as if their income depended on it.

Eh, both are to blame here. The platforms/broadcasters for hosting this content and not removing it when it's proven to be dangerous/illegal/whatever, and the creators for making such content and putting people's lives at risk. It's like the situation with fake products on Amazon; yes Amazon shares some of the blame for not policing their marketplace, but we can't let the scammers/counterfeiters off the hook either, since they're deliberately trying to scam people.

Plus these folks likely wouldn't go away, they'd just go to other places to distribute their 'wares'.

I would agree that at a certain point there's a responsibility of Alphabet recommending videos that can literally cause viewers to accidentally kill themselves.

Paying actual people to moderate a platform as large as YouTube is not reasonable.

I would love to know how many hours of video get appealed each day. I'd be willing to bet there isn't even close to enough money to pay people to make decisions on all of that.

Youtube shouldn't exist. Video hosting and discovery should be separate, like they (largely) are with podcasts.

https://mashable.com/article/youtube-human-content-moderatio...

I am SHOCKED that Google wants to make money and does not care if they hurt people in the process! SHOCKED!

If google had to moderate YouTube in any meaningful way they would go broke, not only because of how much it would cost, but also because of the lawsuits.

There is a reason we have regulations in the United States. It is so things like YouTube never happen in the first place. If they were treated as publishers in the first place we would not be having had this problem.

YouTube is a broadcaster with millions of independent program directors. Until it is seen as such my the Feds nothing will change.

P.S.A.: Don't let your kids use YouTube.

Big Clive has a good video on why this is dangerous and how to make it more safe. Note: not safe safe, just more safe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeSKL9zVro

I like Big Clive (and Electroboom) because they know how to be safe, but do the stupid thing anyways (safely) to show how bad the ideas are.

I can't watch Electroboom because he always gives himself shocks in every video. Don't care that they are small or it's set up, I can't stand watching it, makes me ill. Seems to be interesting stories he's telling otherwise though, so it's a shame.

One of the funniest videos on the internet is Electroboom's "how to make a electric guitar", it looks like it changed the title at some point, I guess for the reasons in the article, but I was on the floor the first time I watched it and he panned down to the plug.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TwIvUbOhcKE

It's disappointing how most of the articles and videos criticizing the dangerous content don't explain why exactly something is dangerous. They just scream "omg high voltage" "one mistake you're dead" and so on. I honestly think they are worse than the source; it reminds me of the medieval experimenters and alchemists being oppressed by the conformist public.

It is interesting to see that also exist channels that monetize how to make these experiments less likely to kill you using a 15 minutes video explaining some physics and one diagram.

More legit than the ones that kill you faster but still part of the same game, specially seeing the title “The most deadly project of the internet”

There is no need for cynicism. (Did you watch the video?) Big Clive is giving quite strong warnings, safety advice, and, this video is not monetized.

It is a sin to tell people about dangers and a virtue to be quiet about them.

Safe by Big Clive standards, who had (on his original website) a "chandelier" made from GU10 bulbs, bare stainless rod, and the little terminal blocks from choccy block connectors, all gloriously exposed and at 240V.

Big Clive will be fine, everything is safely in his explosion-containment pie dish.

I've seen either that Big Clive video or one very similar to it, but I swear the one I saw was long before April 2022. Perhaps early 2021 at the latest, if not earlier. I haven't actually watched very much Big Clive this year.

Unsure if this was a re-upload, or remake of an older video, or if I have totally lost my grasp on time???

"slightly less dangerous"

It's terrible how little basic electronic safety is practiced in virtually all of these videos. When we handled high amps in university, we had 3 hours of lecture first simply explaining safety precautions and how to handle accidents.

Not to mention, the burnt wood looks so gaudy and uninteresting. I would hardly call it fractal as it only goes 2-3 levels usually, and artistically doesn't usually make sense on furniture etc.

It probably should have been more than 3 hours given that you likely mean "voltage" not "amps".

Before everyone jumps on me, "it is the amps that kill you, not voltage", I understand electricity quite well and in this context, saying something like "handling high amps in a university" is almost certainly not what was taught.

Yeah, usually when someone parrots the "it is the amps that kill you, not voltage" line, I have to remind them that the amps depends on the volts.

A car battery is capable of hundreds of amps, but if you touch the contacts with your hands, you won't feel a thing, because the voltage is too low to overcome your body's resistance.

I imagine if you wired the leads to your tongue, your tongue would probably explode though.

Rather than admonishing everyone for wondering the obvious question, why not just explain your reasoning?

Also, it's not electronic safety, its straight up electrical safety. There are no electronics in a magnetron.

I'm glad you assumed a very limited scope of danger being direct electrocution death because in my class I learned there are many compound forms of electrical accident. To quote NEC textbook:

"Even low-voltage installers can still experience unsettling shocks, especially if they are working in an unsafe environment, such as if they are ungrounded or standing on a wet spot,” Johnston said. “While it’s unlikely that such shocks will cause serious injury by themselves, they certainly could literally knock someone off balance, which could be a real safety risk if an installer were standing on a ladder.

“In addition, an arc in a low-voltage system has the same potential for igniting explosive materials as one in a 120-plus-volt system. Chapter 5 of the NEC provides rules for installing electrical wiring of any voltage in a hazardous (classified) location, specifically those locations with high concentrations of flammable or combustible liquids, flammable or combustible vapors, conductive and combustible dusts, and so forth.”

It's also possible for low voltage shocks to cause your hand muscles to seize the hazard and be unable to release it.

In fact, my TENS unit, specifically designed to cause muscle contraction, runs on 9V.

Edit: ah... I see a throwaway account was used, so you will never have to confront your mistake. I wish these were banned.

Lastly, I would encourage you to consider tasers, which deliberately deploy (nonlethally) upwards of 20K volts for multiple seconds.

Once I charged a 1F (not a typo) capacitor with either a AA or 9V battery (can't remember), then touched the leads.

Youch!

I dont know what they did in the uni, I thought it was some wielding or power delivery (CPU and GPUs nowadays deal with 200A+)... So I honestly thought it was high amps, all of them are proper fire hazard.

But you are right, likely it was high voltage.

lmao you couldnt figure out how to turn off your tv... spoilers, hold the power button for 2 seconds.

Maybe they meant high voltage amps

I think the people replying to you to nitpick are missing the forest for the trees.

You (and many people) have to wait until university to learn this stuff if you didn't seek it out yourself (how-to's and electives in school). This kind of knowledge should be taught at a young age to demystify it.

A few hours in uni (and how many people never even go), to learn life-saving information

When I did appliance repair microwaves were treated as bombs. You didn't test your components live, you always unplugged first, etc.

Still walked into another tech working on one (cabinet-mounted up high), with the cover off, barely on a wobbly stove-dolly and his expensive Fluke multimeter out with leads in hand.

I noticed the plug still lifted up into the cabinet so I peeked in and sure enough it was plugged in.

Big red warning signs on the power cable, the covers inside and the cover outside all had warnings. Dude had been through the same training I had, and still thought it was a good idea. "I'll just stay away from the high side",he said.

edit to add this microwave had an external fuse. All you had to do was unscrew it and check the fuse inside- which was bad. He hadn't had to do any of the stuff he'd done prior to my arrival. They'd had an electrical surge when the power had gone out and the fuse had caught it. This tech had been on the job longer than I. end edit

Even people trained and with knowledge make mistakes and sometimes are just plain stupid.

People without knowledge can be dangers to themselves and others.

Texas had a rash of house explosions a few years ago from people raiding copper and power wires from empty houses with live gas lines.

I think the answer is educating and many people as possible, from as young an age as possible.

A friend of a friend disassembled a microwave to repair it, and accidentally put one of the radiation shields back on backwards. It ended up killing his wife (lots of cancers) a few years later.

So, yeah. Don't repair microwaves. It's really not worth the $100's you'll save on a replacement.

Why was the cancer attributed to the microwave incident? After all, it's not ionizing radiation.

How would he know the microwave was the cause?

Wait until more DIY EV servicing videos start appearing. If you short something across a decent size EV battery it will be converted into plasma and deposited on your face.

EV is DC, and DC sparks are a thing of beauty as they lack self-extinguishing properties unlike AC sparks.

where your face recently was.

> Not to mention, the burnt wood looks so gaudy and uninteresting. I would hardly call it fractal as it only goes 2-3 levels usually, and artistically doesn't usually make sense on furniture etc.

There's some point I could make about how this is the worst art anyone has ever died for in history, but we'd end up in the weeds.

I'd be interested in trekking through those weeds.

Anyone have a contender for worse deadly art?

Electronic -> electrical

When I was young and stupid, I did this. Suddenly felt some tingling sensation in my fingers, threw the leads away and jumped back. Most certainly saved my life and drilled in my head how dangerous it is. Still get a sinking feeling in my stomach whenever I am at some switching station below the 380KV leads, remembering that day. Especially after knowing people who got into 120KV, and what happened to them...

Electricity is dangerous. In every form. Period. Keep your fingers away from it when you don't know what you do. Household appliances can not only kill you on the mains side. Microwave transformers, flyback circuits, burner igniters, HV Car Ignition Systems...

>Electricity is dangerous. In every form. Period. Keep your fingers away from it when you don't know what you do

An additional problem here is that the risks are different in different forms. Here, it sounds like people are approaching the technique based on their experiences and assumptions about mains electricity, or even car batteries.

2 kV is high enough voltage that arcing is a risk. Things they'll assume are insulators and safe, or even usable as protection, may be conductive through dielectric breakdown: in the case of wood, that's the whole point of the technique. Even air won't necessarily be safe if they're handling things so closely, especially if it's humid, in which case they could get breakdown at well over 1 mm. Meanwhile, GFCI/RCD is useless, because of the transformer.

I had one the other week where I was replacing an outlet in the kitchen. I flipped the kitchen breaker and the lights and appliances all turned off. I skipped the important step of actually testing the outlet and stupidly assumed it no longer had power. Turns out it was on a different circuit from the rest of the kitchen. The outlet was stuck in the wall box so I reached a flathead screwdriver in to try and pry it out, and turned my screwdriver into an arc welder for a second. Fortunately I wasn't hurt and only got a melted screwdriver tip and a smoky smell out of it, but I'm definitely not going to let myself make that mistake ever again.

I made the mistake of not testing _all_ of the wires in an outlet a couple of months ago.

I used a non contact voltmeter, and had shut off the breaker to the outlet I was working on. Little did I know that the jackass that did some previous wiring in the house had run wires from a different breaker in to this box. It was done in such a way that I didn't fully realize it could have separate live.

My palm below my thumb touched the live and neutral and gave me a pretty solid shock.

I'll definitely test every single freaking wire in a box from now on. F people who try to play electrician without knowing what they are doing!

I have one even better, just to show how you can't be sure...

Replacing an outlet. Shut off the 2-pole breaker for the shared-neutral circuit it was on. Outlet tester showed the outlet was off. Pull the receptacle out. Used a multimeter to test each wire contact to ground; all were 0v.

Only when I disconnected all the wires did one of them develop potential because somebody had apparently tied a neutral wire to a hot in another box, but I still don't understand the situation and had an electrician address it.

So even testing each individual wire isn't certain unless they're all hanging free, unless you make the assumption that things were wired correctly in the first place.

> The outlet was stuck in the wall box so I reached a flathead screwdriver in to try and pry it out, and turned my screwdriver into an arc welder for a second.

I've got a screwdriver that incorporates a non-contact AC current sensor. Mine is a Gardner Bender SDT-354 [1] that I think I bought at Home Depot or Lowe's.

When the current sensor is turned on if you bring the tip of the screwdriver near a live AC wire an LED in the handle starts rapidly blinking and a beeper starts rapidly beeping.

It once may have saved me from a nasty shock. I have an outdoor light over the garage that is controlled by a light sensor, and the light sensor was going bad. It would turn the light on when it got dark but not turn it off in the morning. So I'd flip the breaker for that light off and then back on every morning.

When morning when I went to open the electrical panel in the garage I got a shock from the panel door. I went in and got the current sensing screwdriver and went back to the garage to see if I could get an idea of what the heck was going on.

As soon as I stepped into the garage the screwdriver started blinking and beeping. A little experimenting showed it would go off anywhere in the front half of the garage that was more than about a meter above the floor.

It turned out that the metal garage doors and the metal rails their rollers rolled on and the metal tracks the garage door openers pulled the doors on were all connected to live AC.

I got the fuck out of there and called an electrician.

What happened was that in the shed next to the garage that houses my well some critter had chewed through some of the insulation on some of the wiring for powering the well pump. I'm not sure how but that somehow made the cover and door of the electrical panel and all those metal parts of my garage door system electrified, but without stopping the well pump from receiving power.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Circuit-Alert-Blade-Screw-Driver/dp/B...

I have one of those little screwdrivers with a small light to detect current; I always use it on everything electric before I actually touch anything.

It amazes me how often strange anomolies slip through safety procedures. I use a voltmeter to check before working on wiring, and like you, have still managed to grab a live wire more than once. Last time, it was a situation much as yours - had the breaker off for the circuit I was certain I was working. And I checked with the voltmeter. But like a damned fool, I only checked the hot to ground voltage, and not the neutral to ground, or hot to neutral. Yep, you guessed it - the outlet was on a circuit for a different room, and was miswired in a junction box, reversing neutral and hot. I got the full benefit of the 120v. Fortunately, standing on a dry wooden floor in rubber soled shoes, I was a lousy path to ground, but still a dangerous situation I have no desire to repeat.

> Still get a sinking feeling in my stomach whenever I am at some switching station below the 380KV leads

If you would like to get into the psychology of someone like this I am a big fan of watching photonic induction: https://www.youtube.com/user/Photonvids

He is, seemingly, a power company tech from the UK who just really loves high voltage and messes with it in his home with his buddy.

Such as a gun is always loaded, my take is electricity is always dangerous.

Even professionals can get into accidents, moreover us uneducated plebs.

Every electrician I have met, has had some kind of shock in their career. Mostly it is a small induced current issue, which can easily kill you if it knocks you off a ladder....

I remember watching some electricians rewiring some stuff at my old workplace. We were moving into a new office, and had to have some light switches changed for the new zone.

The electrician popped open the switch plates, yanked out the old switches, clipped the wires, stripped the wires, wired up the new switches, and screwed everything back together.

It was all live (like 300 volt live), as the lights turned on (queue spark), as he wired the new switches. He was not wearing gloves. It was all barehanded.

It was quick, though. Took, like, a minute.

And remember that RCDs or GFCIs are not the panacea they may seem like at first. All it takes is an unreferenced secondary and voila, ground faults are invisible.

Can you explain what you mean by unreferenced secondary in this context?

> Electricity is dangerous. In every form.

Well — so is an empty room, because there is no air to breathe.

Pretty much everything is dangerous in some form. You can die from excessive water ingestion. You can die falling from a bicycle.

I don't think blanket statements like yours are helpful in actually making things safer. Safety low-voltage electrical systems are designed to be safe - not perfectly safe, but comparably safe to other ambient risks of life. We can't bubble-wrap everything. There is no 100%, only a question of how many nines you want after the dot on 99%.

But regardless, the videos at issue are quite obviously not in the "99% safe" category and YouTube's behavior is egregiously inacceptable.

I had a similar experience in completely different circumstances. I was hiking in the mountains with my dad and some friends when a storm cloud rolled over us. It wasn't raining yet, but one of us noticed that if he raised a metal hiking pole above his head there was a tingling feeling. We all were trying it when my dad caught up and said "what are you doing you idiots, drop those poles, crouch down, and start praying".

Thankfully there were no strikes, and after a couple of minutes the cloud had passed. Electricity is dangerous!

Playing with microwaves carries many risks. Even without getting electricity involved, the magnetron contains beryllium oxide which can be fatal to humans if it gets into the lungs. Just to disassemble one, you need to know what the magnetron looks like and not try to disassemble it.

Like many other appliances, it has capacitors, which may remain charged for a long time too. Those are dangerous too.

Thank God we didn't have any microwave ovens when I was a kid because I liked to disassemble everything

But there was one capacitor from a photo flashlight that was close to killing me if I touched the ends, but thankfully it discharged on my screwdriver

I got zapped by the capacitor of a photo flash twice. I studied electronics, I was being carefully, and still I messed up. The second time I was being even more careful and I thought the capacitor was discharged. I'm not even sure how it happened, I was holding the PCB by the edges.

>Just to disassemble one, you need to know what the magnetron looks like and not try to disassemble it.

I know what you’re going for here, but it’s a funny sentence.

Wait, why did YT remove Ann’s video? She doesn’t show how it’s done. She just shows, through drawings, how dangerous it is.

WTF Yiutube.

I'm going to guess the people and companies profiting from those videos reported her video.

Google takes 45% of YouTube's advertising revenue. Videos criticizing their most popular channels directly impact their profits. The company doesn't care about protecting content consumers, it only cares about their customers (advertisers) and maximizing profits. They tolerate content creators since they actually get them views, but otherwise they would rather run ads 24/7 if people would watch them.

Because she talks about death, and YouTube can't monetize videos about death.

And thus, the video was deemed worthless to the whole system (unfortunately).

But that's of course short sighted: even a court could find youtube reckless if they selectively remove videos of caution while leaving up dangerous videos; if both are left up they might get off free.

Instead they keep the videos she calls out for causing death. Since at least they don't talk about death. Jesus christ google is a vile company!

youtube effectively has abandoned moderation policy, and just has automated report-driven systems.

I bet the video was removed because fractal woodburners with delusions of safety felt angry for being called out, and reported it.

I'm only now leaning of this phenomenon, and I'm absolutely floored that something like fractal wood burning has claimed the lives of 34 people (known), and there's a general laisse-faire attitude around it.

By itself this is close to the deadliest mass shootings in the history of the United States in terms of human casualties, even though the emotional impact is not the same.

Some kinds of deaths are more "media-ready" than others.

Deaths from mass-shootings, terrorism, plane crashes, and shark attacks are given too much weight. Deaths from falls, drowning, and medical mistakes are given too little weight.

Even within categories it's inconsistent. Most deaths by gunshot are suicides. And almost all murders by gunshot are ordinary pistols as part of ordinary criminal activity (not mass shooters).

I think YouTube/Google has a big leadership crisis at the moment. Removing the dislike counter was the obvious sign.

With a dislike counter at least that could signal something is amiss with these videos, but now you just see thumbs up everythings cool guys and the comments can be moderated by the uploader to remove anything negative.

Still don't understand why they removed it.

Money. Lots of dislikes imply lots of ad views.

Downvotes hurt the feelings and egos of enough people with the power/leverage to get it changed. Particularly: politicians, corporations, and youtube executives themselves (e.g. Youtube's Rewind videos getting trashed with mass downvotes.)

Thank you for reminding me that viewers can't even vote down to try to inform others of how bad those videos are. YT's leadership needs to be replaced.

At scale, whack-a-mole take-downs and trying to idiot-proof the internet just feel kinda futile.

A suggested (IANAL) alternative, for "dangerous ways to maim or kill yourself" YouTube content:

- A "Report Being A Dangerous Thing To Try" YouTube page - with a few drop-downs, to summarize why it's dangerous. (High Voltage, Poison, Explosive, Fire Hazard, Dangerous Animals, Motor Vehicle Stunts, etc.)

- Verified-as-dangerous videos stay up, but get a few seconds of skull-and-crossbones warning. With a death count, and "report yet another death" link. That last has a high enough bar ("crippled-for-life doesn't count, include official death certificate and certified police or medical report, ...") to make it clear that there are real dead bodies behind that body count.

Unstated goal: Encourage less-stupid people to realize that following cool-sounding directions from the internet could maim or kill them. Whether or not anyone has yet gone to the effort required to get a specific video flagged as deadly.

Warnings like these can become diluted if the context of these reports are not specific enough. Listing rock climbing free solo deaths on videos of people top rope climbing will get an eye roll from people and make it easier to disregard. It's also not fair to communities that understand the risks of what they are doing to see these reminders of dangers they are already aware of.

Imperfect moderation is inevitable at the massive scale of social media companies. YouTube receives an enormous quantity of video every day and it’s clearly impossible to have humans review all of it. If we humans did review every single minute of video, the subjective element of moderation would still lead to headlines like this where someone could identify instances of inconsistencies.

Given that she re-uploaded the video and I’m watching it on YouTube right now, I assume the initial moderation strike was more of a mistake. Or more likely, maybe it was reported by a number of people who were upset by it for some reason and it entered an auto-moderation queue.

I have a hard time getting too worked up about news stories of singular moderation mistakes. Does anyone realistically expect YouTube to have perfectly consistent moderation? Even HN, a significantly smaller community, has very uneven and inconsistent moderation due to the user-influenced flagging features.

> Imperfect moderation is inevitable at the massive scale of social media companies. YouTube receives an enormous quantity of video every day and it’s clearly impossible to have humans review all of it.

Yes, this is the root of the content tech boom of the last 20 years: we’ll cut corners to make publishing and distribution as cheap as possible and displace the remaining cost to third-parties (advertisers, data buyers) so that nobody actually involved in the content has any accountability.

And the negative consequences of this approach are rapidly becoming clear to society. We’ll be spending the next 20 years trying to bring those consequences back in line with our values and societal needs.

It’s like technical debt, but for societal projects instead of engineering projects.

That's true. However, bad moderation is most harmful when clickbait-for-profit gets profitable enough to have their boiler room crew mass-report responsible people debunking the clickbait.

This is the bad stuff. It's also the stuff that can be caught with enough anti-spam effort. The example in this article fits that model: A toxic creator farm getting away with a coordinated mass-reporting campaign against an individual. It's just bad anti-spam and YouTube deserves the criticism.

How hard is it to use manual review for videos that have at least a million views?

What makes you think they don't use manual review for highly-viewed videos?

The video in question wouldn't have triggered that manual review threshold because it's not even close to a million views. I would actually assume that highly-viewed videos are moved up much higher in the manual review priority queue, as it only makes sense.

The controversies like the one in the article are generally among moderately popular channels with 10K - 100K views, not in the millions.

> Imperfect moderation is inevitable at the massive scale of social media companies.

If social media companies can't function well at that scale, what's the reason for having social media companies at that scale? We should set and enforce expectations, and when companies get to the scale where they can't meet those expectations, fine them until they "rightsize."

I'm a fan of removing legal carve outs for social media companies. If it's hosted on your domain, then you are liable, just as a book publisher would be.

If people want to publish stuff, they can buy a raspberry pi or an s3 bucket.

If people want to moderate content, they can hire an editorial staff (like magazines and podcasts do).

I'm not sure how to handle Wikipedia. It's a net positive for society, and this proposal would effectively ban it. That's the only impacted site I can think of that I think is worth saving.

nothing is perfect but google has a market capitalization of 1.5 trillion dollars, i'm sure they can afford to remove of put warning on dangerous videos

Then maybe they shouldn't spread it across the globe?

> YouTube receives an enormous quantity of video every day and it’s clearly impossible to have humans review all of it.

Micro moderation might not be possible, but meta moderation certainly is. If a story such as the fractal burning has made the news that means it has passed through plenty of human brains along the way. That sort of thing should be noticed by meta moderation. This reminds me of the YouTuber who uploaded 2 Million Videos over the course of years and was not shut down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olkb7fYSyiI

The only way for that not to be dealt with is by gross negligence.

> YouTube receives an enormous quantity of video every day and it’s clearly impossible to have humans review all of it

But not all of that content gets picked by the algorithm to be shown to millions of people.

They don’t have to manually check everything. But if they are considering putting something at the top of their homepage for a large number of people, would it kill them to have someone give the content a once over to see if it might be dangerous?

I noticed I feel literally unsafe watching any DIY video on there now that the dislikes are gone. I realize I'm proceeding in a place where I relied on a warning system that has been taken away.

There's a workaround:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dis...

There are browser extensions which crowd source YouTube dislikes now that the API is completely gone like "Return YouTube Dislike"

Don't you have empathy for poor creators like the executive branch of the US federal government though? The dislike button was making things rough for them.

I swear, the YouTube staff was just salty about the ratios on their cringe-fest Rewind videos.

What?

> It is extraordinarily dangerous, and dozens of people have been killed following instructions contained in viral videos.

Thought this might be an exaggeration (classic “well I’ve never heard of this” brain), but here’s a case that happened just a few months ago:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna26109

The AAW have banned the practice because it is so dangerous and have been maintaining a list of the people killed by it, including at least one professional electrician.

https://www.woodturner.org/Woodturner/Woodturner/Resources/S...

At what point do we say, "automation as a reason for failure is no longer acceptable"?

Edit: That is, when the published information is wrong, false, and was not taken down, or was taken down...

I'm not sure why that was ever an acceptable excuse. If you automate something and it gets people killed, where does the absolution come in, exactly?

"The Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of Fantasia is quite illustrative about the dangers of automation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DX2yVucz24

BigCliveDotCom has an excellent video about this:

"The most deadly project on the Internet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeSKL9zVro

Never trust corporations (or anyone for that matter), even the most well intentioned of ones, to always make rational decisions, even when they hire rational people and write down rational policies.

Disagreed. I see this as perfectly rational in given their business model and regulatory environment they operate in.

Their business relies on ad revenue (derived from video views) and they are no regulations that hold them liable for hosting dangerous content, nor for mistakenly-deleted content.

Therefore the rational thing to do is let the mistakenly-deleted videos down (reviewing them manually would cost too much) while leaving anything else that doesn't trip the spam filter up (since they generate ad views).

Would have loved to see a source of "34 fractal wood burning deaths in America"

Here's a list:

https://www.woodturner.org/Woodturner/Resources/Safety-Mater...

Example from the parent's link: """ Upper Caboolture, Queensland, Australia Reported by: Energy Source & Distribution Death: Liam Keegan, age 17 March 23, 2021 """

^ Many don't list the age, but this one did. And it made me sad.

Knowing that microwave oven transformers are extremely dangerous is critically important, so this represents a serious failing of basic education.

Exactly. I can't sympathise with any of the people who mess around with stuff like this. Surely if you had even the littlest bit of common sense, you would know not to mess around with high voltages without training.

To the people saying "mass report all fractal burning videos" - why not also take down videos on surfing, outdoor rock-climbing, and other dangerous sports?

The whole point of the 'trusted news initiative' [0] is to combat the so called 'fake news', and disinformation and to replace that (or at least flag these videos as 'misleading') with actual fact checked articles, videos, etc.

What is happening here is the direct opposite of the TNI [0] and especially YouTube is removing videos unveiling the dangers in these fractal wood-burning videos and are instead promoting these absolutely hazardous and high risk videos whilst still aiding and 'sharing dangerous falsehoods.'.

This isn't the only occurrence but it's quite clear that YouTube as well as the rest of the TNI is a giant failure in stopping disinformation and are instead doing the exact opposite.

The TNI should not be trusted in the first place and is now a disinformation source.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/beyondfakenews/trusted-news-initiative...

Just about all occurrences have been so, it just depends what you believe.

Entirely obvious irony in naming it 'Trusted News Initiative' like a good old 'Honest Al's Second-hand Cars!'

Marketing 101: Any adjective with a positive connotation in a brand name or marketing copy is a lie.

"Easy to assemble", "quiet operation", "durable nonstick coating"," trustworthy computing", "digital rights", etc, etc.

They can auto generate warning messages on every video even tangentially referencing the c-word for 2 years, but they let this kind of thing slide for years and years.

Ignoring the politics & posturing, my impression is that the number of people dead due to stupidity about COVID-19 is a few orders of magnitude larger than the number of people dead due to this sort of video.

I don't think the point was about the relative number of dead; I think it the observation that YT clearly has the technology to automatically annotate content, but declines to use it for things (like dangerous hacks) where it could save lives.

Yeah, but they did a terrible job of this.

They still push anti vaxxer conspiracy theory crap, but they immediately banned actual tenured scientists with decades of experience writing and reviewing papers on pandemic response.

If anything, their treatment of this video is par for the course. They're banning the factually correct content, and pushing popular misinformation that kills people.

Someone made a commercial fractal wood burning device years ago. It had very long handled probes (1-2 ft.) and a pedal for switching on the power (there might have been a main power switch inline on the device itself.) It had a dial to let you crank up the amperage. I think someone did get hurt using it. Reputable art/woodworking events and people do not allow or use fractal wood burning because the inherent risk is so high.

I am sorry but I strongly disagree with most comments here. I do a lot of things potentially extremely dangerous, like burning wood with a microwave, or driving a motorcycle, or playing with hydrogen and oxygen in stoichiometric ratio, I tried to melt a wrench with a 12V battery, and all that makes me a better engineer and a better person, more aware of the weakness of flesh and how reality is scary and how it dont care about our stupid meaty body.

I feel I see a lot of class contempt here, "those stupid people dont know that it's dangerous, they should stick with devices conceived by us. We educated people put stupid warning labels on it just for them". Of course, those poor soul should have been more aware of the danger, but censuring those video, or forbidding them to play with microwave, is that really what we want ? Anybody should be aware about the basic physics, that's the real problem here. I dont want to see moral video "dont do that because it's wrong", I would more video like "look at that how dangerous it is, and also, how cool is that".

About electroboom, I am the only one to think that being zapped again and again does a really poor job at passing the message "electricity is dangerous and can kill you"? If some people dont understand the dangerousity of electricity, maybe they just learnt from electroboom. I much prefer the channel "diode gone wild".

Trying to be charitable but this is insane.

I'm not against people taking risks as long as it's very clear what risks they're taking, and as long as the reward is worth it (for any reasonable definition of "worth it").

Pretty much everyone knows how dangerous motorcycles are, and plans (or doesn't, but still their choice) accordingly. The whole point of Ann Reardon's video is that tons of people tried this, and at least 60+ died, without having any concept of how dangerous it actually is. That is also evidenced by many of the videos showing, for example, bare legs and bare hands inches away from lethal contact.

On the "worth it" side of things, obviously that's subjective, and I think the original patterns are neat, but it seems very much a "you've seen one, you've pretty much seen them all" type of effect. Are you honestly saying that you think a substantial risk of death is worth it here?

That's not really her point, she says "even professional electrician" and so on, she adopt a very of moral approach and I am not very fond of moral.

It's a substantial risk of death only if you doing it wrong. I mean, the problem here is not playing with a microwave transformer, it's doing it inside, it's holding both electrodes in both hands, it's the lack of isolation, it's having a device you can switch on by accident and so on.

A lot of people here seems to consider it's moral imperative to not do that, this wont make people smarter, nor more reasonable.

34 people killed is a pretty surprising number.

Is it fair to refer to the makers of the videos as murderers?

On a moral, if not legal, level?

That's 34 known and only in the US, as noted by Ann. Her new video notes 30 in the UK and more in Australia (where she lives). And it can't be reiterated enough, this is those that are known to be caused by this. It makes you wonder how many other electrocutions or fires were caused by this without noting this as the source, whether known or not.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's precedence nor law that places liability on these people.

If they contributed to the takedown of the critical video which informs about the dangers and deaths then I don't find myself able to casually dismiss the accusation of murder (as I would were that not the case).

I'm not sure murder is the right crime here. Seems more passive like willfull neglect or something. Not a lawyer.

Youtube is an increasingly hot mess.

I was considering searching for and reporting all "Fractal Wood Burning" videos.

But you need to be signed in to flag a video, and there's no way I'm polluting my viewing history (and thus what YT thinks I like) with such shit.

You can go back and delete the videos from your history and YT should treat it as though you never watched it. I make use of this on occasion when I click a video I really shouldn't have.

You can delete them from your history, and you can indicate in the feed that you don't want those kinds of videos in it through the three dot menu

Is there any way to filter out certain Youtube channels such that they cannot be viewed in your house? My kids like some of TheSoul channels and I'm not particularly happy with them watching content created by Russians.

So are the authors of the fractal wood burning videos criminally negligent?

What of the publishers?

Sorry way to many ads on that site. Like every paragraph...

Why is this so hard for these massive companies? A single reasonable person can make better decisions than this.

There's only so many videos a single reasonable person can watch. And once you scale it it's no longer a single reasonable person but a vast army of low-paid content watchers.

A person is smart, people are dumb. - Agent KA, Men in Black (https://quotes.yourdictionary.com/author/quote/127467)

See also, "None of us is as dumb as all of us." (https://despair.com/products/meetings?variant=4375841505301)

thanks

Censorship sucks but when its it YouTube's responsibility to protect idiots from themselves? If they removed these videos are they still responsible for people attempting the stunt because they heard about it there six months ago?

I demand the freedom to suffer the consequences of my own actions.

YouTube has their own policy of taking down content they call “harmful & dangerous,” this person is complaining that they are enforcing it incorrectly by taking down her video talking about the dangers and not taking down or age gating the videos of people showing how to do it.

> I demand the freedom to suffer the consequences of my own actions.

You will absolutely suffer the consequences of whatever actions you take, I’m not sure why you seem to think YouTube would prevent that.

"harmful & dangerous" to whom?

It could easily be the case that a popular channel warning 'DON'T DO THIS' could make the situation worse by telling more people about an idea they would never have heard of otherwise.

The fact that some (presumably less seen) videos haven't been removed (yet) doesn't change this calculus.

That is a very creative excuse but it cannot explain why this video which described the dangers of the practice and did not explain in detail how to go about doing. It would be removed when none of the videos that demonstrate how to do this were taken down.

I think a much more plausible explanation is that YouTube simply does not have an effective mechanism for deciding what videos to take down and which ones to leave up.

And yet they've decided they should have the authority and mandate to do so. You can't automate good moderation.

Thats an extremely negative view of people's ability. There's a point where you have to realize you can't protect people from themselves. A video that simply provides knowledge in an accessible way without preaching and condescension does far more than an outright ban that gives the viewer no information.

The new video shows lots of examples of comments on the original video where people thanked her for warning them not to do it, so it's worth factoring that in. Certainly a couple people will go 'wow, getting killed to make cool wood? sounds sick' and do it but I suspect the number of people scared away is higher.

We really need to finish with this content removal business and simply hold people accountable for the content.

In other words, YouTube or any "utility level" platform should not have the right to remove content by its own and just request information to protect itself. For example, if someone is posting about something harmful the videos should remain and the person who does that should face the consequences.

It's not just that the platforms suck in judging the content, the more important aspect is that this content is also part of historical record. I would like to be able to watch and examine content from criminals, from fraudsters or pranksters.

For example, it's fascinating that Heaven's Gate cult website is still alive and kicking[0]. I'm glad that I can take a look at the real thing but if their mass su*cide happened today, I'm sure that all kind of materials about them would be promptly removed and we will be forced to accept only the official narrative(which might be or might not be correct on this case but that's not the point). None of us would be allowed to read their texts, listen to their conversation and judge it by ourselves.

[0] https://www.heavensgate.com

> For example, if someone is posting about something harmful the videos should remain and the person who does that should face the consequences.

Ok, so now a video is up and people are tricked by it and injure themselves in the process. Some people die. Is that an acceptable cost? Does your solution make any considerations for ongoing harm?

Sue the person who uploaded the video, as it happens with all the malicious activities with the real world.

Sure, we can have tools to reduce risk - maybe there can be a warning under the video that the contents are disputed and some people claimed harm. If those people are lying the video uploader can sue them.

Just because some people don't know how to behave and have delusions that nothing is real on the internet, we can't have total speech control in an attempt of "saving the kids".

Just as with the real world, people need to develop the right habits to stay safe.

> Some people die. Is that an acceptable cost? Does your solution make any considerations for ongoing harm?

You talk as if this isn't exactly what happened in the current framework of private censorship.

Even if abolishing private censorship would cause the scenario you outlined, that wouldn't be worse than the current situation and at least you'd solve the problem of pointless censorship.

YouTube didn't introduce content moderation (apart from copyright, and flat out illegal material) because daddy government told them to.

They introduced moderation because companies threatened to pull advertising because they didn't want their brands plastered next to awful content.

YouTube totally has the right to leave plenty of dangerous or morally repugnant content up. But they don't have the right to other companies' advertising money if said companies jump ship.

I would agree that eliminating content removal would make sense if they also eliminated their recommendation system.

From a legal perspective, making them legally liable for any content they promote (but not content they merely distribute) might fix the problem.

Even just bringing thumbs down would go a long way. They took a very useful metric away from technical how-to videos.

> simply hold people accountable for the content.

Yes but by what level of accountability? If I make a video about changing a clutch, and then some kid drops a gearbox on his face and kills himself, who is responsible? Is Demolition Ranch responsponsible for mass shootings? Is the History channel actually racist because it rebroadcasts Hitler all the time?

That's up to the courts to decide. Definitely not Youtube's business though.

The thing is the whole house of cards was built on pseudonymous growth. Most Youtube accounts can be traced back to specific people and corporations, sure, but it takes a lot of manual effort to figure it out and the success rate is not 100%. And what do you do when the person is based in a country with no regards for the rule of law, no extradition treaty with the US, yet its citizens still have the ability to post videos to Youtube?

What you're proposing would not only slow down the growth of Youtube, it would contract it. And proposing to Google that anything they do should get smaller for the benefit of mankind is somehow a cardinal sin against capitalism.

I have this proposition that I wrote about previously. The core of the idea is that the platforms can remove your content only if you are anonymous and you can re-instantiate your content and override moderation by accepting full responsibility through revealing your true identity. So if it happens that someone post some really nasty material, the police knocks on their door and content is removed only then(some type of content can be straight out illegal, like specific types of porn).

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