Soft White Underbelly demonetized by YouTube [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
The good news for Soft White Underbelly is what I've just said above - look, there are plenty of business models out there that can work, and they're actually much more valuable revenue streams than Youtube ads. The bad news is, what exactly is Youtube at this point if all of their high value content is disintermediating their revenue model? Well, advertising to kids, which is minefield, advertising on music videos, which they're doing worse than Spotify, or advertising on things like Podcasts, which are adverts on content that you otherwise would get ad free elsewhere.
So I feel like, using the YouTube model, should be used more as bootstrapping step while you find a more sustainable revenue model. Or you’ll forever be subjected to the whims of the algorithm.
What's worse is youtube entirely controls the market, and they opened the floodgates of caving to advertiser demands. Now advertisers expect it wherever they go. They should be 4th class citizens if anything, not a meaningful constituency. As long as youtube keeps driving users to the platform, that should be the only concern.
I don’t disagree but I also think
* many companies want to sell to idiots
* vocal fringe ideologists can blow these financial relationships up into a PR incident
* some responsible companies actually do care about where their money goes
* YouTube also doesn’t want negative PR “YouTube financially supports [bad thing]” but at the same time understands that demonetized content is important attracting factor to the platform overall
I don’t think YouTube is to blame here. The issue is that ad supported platforms inherently have advertisers as customers, and viewers are only a means to an end. The entire business model is flawed in the lens of the viewer or content producer, and there’s no way to fix it.
They are. They opened the floodgates of coddling advertisers. Before they did, no one listened to them at all.
Advertisers don’t just get customers out of thin air, they have to convince their customers to become customers.
Back in the day, it was conservatives doing all the censorship because Johnny couldn’t hear a profanity on tv without becoming an idiot. (At home was always fine, that is of course freedom of speech).
These sort of associations are literally one of the main ways Google sells ads.
In magazines, advertisers might want to know what article is facing their ad. Or which show their commercial would be on.
And advertisers are very cautious of being associated with things they do not like.
And there has always been content that most advertisers have not wanted to go near. Porn, being the easiest example.
This is not pop psychology it's real stuff.
Advertisers were making such 'demands' since the dawn of advertising nothing is new here.
But if you hate 1. the advert, or 2. the content, then you can make a public argument that they are and there's not a good way to say you arn't. I mean there's kind of a justification for it. If you wern't bidding on that adspot, someone else would have gotten it for a bit lower.
The fact that you CAN say it and kinda defend it allows you to activate demographics of people that already hate your target. No one is interested in sober analysis when they have axes to grind.
Yes, but also, we live in a very incendiary society where some people are willing to take on whatever story and blow it out of proportion. Your face or trademark in a banner on the wrong website is enough for someone to link you to whatever cause that site is promoting and that could be the end of your business/career, literally.
As a rule, people spend time watching content they like, and that's where advertisers should want to be, it doesn't matter if it lines up with their image or not, for the most part the only people that see your ad next to a video of something potentially disagreeable are people positively predisposed to that idea anyway.
Obviously getting your video flagged as sexual, violent or whatever other default-disabled category would still greatly impact your profits as you will have less ads bidding on your video but it is far better than the 0 revenue of today.
The impression I get is that it's best not to explore his motivations too much, as they're quite disappointing compared to what he's been able to create.
I highly recommend this YT channel.
The clothing isn't the issue, since there are lots of other videos on YouTube with women wearing less, that aren't (yet) problematic, so it's not the sexual content itself as much the context surrounding the sexual content. Corporate America prefers a Disneyfied version of reality, and anything that falls outside that they try to banish. They will tolerate sexual content as long as it promotes consumption and aligns with capitalist thinking.
Consider this Jay-Z song Big Pimpin', which glorifies the objectification of sex workers and women in general. Contrast that with Soft White Underbelly which humanizes the same types of people.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Cgoqrgc_0cM
Even though this is dealing with very similar subject matter and the women in it are wearing far less clothing, it will probably never be demonitized. Why? It's encouraging consumption and promoting the idea that being wealthy means you get to have lots of happy sex with women that will let you objectify them, because of your money. Also Jay-Z's wealth means he's more important and the rules apply to him differently (if at all).
Whereas Soft White Underbelly is showing a more sad and complicated view of sexuality and the objectification of human beings, one that doesn't promote consumption and glorification of wealth. Someone might watch that and realize that a sex worker selling their body for money isn't really that different than someone destroying their body working in an Amazon warehouse, or other jobs that require physical labor, and an idea like that is threatening to Corporate America.
I'm not singling out hip hop, but rather that's a song that's so misogynistic that even Jay-Z himself has disowned it:
https://www.republicworld.com/entertainment-news/music/jay-z...
This is a huge loss, SWU is one of the best creators on YouTube and I've been really moved by some of his interviews. Pretty much all the creators I follow on YT are either self-censoring or not posting videos anymore, because of this nonsense. Kudos to him for continuing the work, I didn't know that his proceeds went back to the communities he's portraying so I definitely will be making a GoFundMe donation.
Some of the videos that Soft White Underbelly creates are demonetized, or as YouTube puts it, found to not be suitable for all advertisers.
Creating content on YouTube has been my full-time job for more than five years. There is a HUGE difference between a channel being kicked out of the Partner Program and videos being 'demonetized.' (Namely, that in the latter case, all of your other videos, past and future, can still earn revenue.)
Honestly, this just seems like the guy is trying to encourage people to pay for his "members only" content. I don't blame him for that, but afactual alarmist titles are not the right way to help him along.
YouTube's policies regarding advertiser friendliness are annoying, but they are mostly clear — and as far as I know, they have not substantively changed recently.
2. "Demonetized," when describing a YouTube channel, means one thing and one thing only: that the channel has been kicked out of the YouTube Partner Program.
I don't know why you would adopt your own, materially-different, definition of a word whose definition is widely accepted. Doing so creates unnecessary confusion, and — particularly in this case — is highly misleading.
They have allowed people to make a living there for years and will shut them down with no warning whenever they like or at the whim of a terrible algorithm (or report brigading). It is a horrible business relationship.
No guarantees that you don't feed your addictions with this money though...but your addiction is good content anyway.
Were they forced to do the interviews? Do you have evidence that shows they felted being exploited?
Keep in mind we're in a society that doesn't consider you able to consent if you're even a little bit drunk and we're talking about heavy drug users for the most part here.
Turning it into a tax writeoff doesn't make it less exploitative.
- facts are regularly presented,
- multiple viewpoints are solicited and presented
SWB strips all that away. I'd go as far as to call it docxploitation, but I suppose "My 600 lb Life" has gotten away with parading the vulnerable around.
This likely isn't really targeted, or about content at its core, and is instead for the express purpose of boosting YouTube's revenue.
YouTube ads are currently more vulgar than this content.
Vice knowingly smeared RMS, inexcusably. THey refused to acknowledge this or apologise for their role. They burned McAfee with an iPhone picture with location metadata. They're anti-journalism.
I don't know SWU, but people have pointed out that 100% of the profits go to ending poverty. Doesn't sound like something a docxploiter would do.
As far as I know, there is no evidence of that beyond the creator's claims. What happened to skepticism? The creator has enormous economic incentives to lie.
If he is truly putting all of his channel's revenue "back into the communities that I shoot in" (whatever that means), why wouldn't he be proudly transparent about what that means.
How much money? Where has it gone? Can anyone verify it?
I would love to be wrong about this, but as far as I know the answers are:
Nobody knows. Nobody knows. No.
Not really. People don't watch his channel to fund communities.
> Nobody knows. Nobody knows. No.
Have you asked him?
> why wouldn't he be proudly transparent about what that means.
Why do people need to provide receipts on the internet for their good deeds? It's not like he's using the donated profits line as his main marketing device.
BTW, YouTube still makes money off demonetized videos, since they increase overall viewer engagement; which nullifies your core point.
Demonitized content has _zero_ reach on YouTube. It's them telling you that they do not want you. There's no point to uploading new content when you're demonitized.
How often? How many people will see it? How many views vs monetized?
I'd rather not have such direct representation of myself out there - invariably people would recognize you, and invariably they would pass the video around social groups. Just the way things work in the social media era.
Also, this could really hurt you if a video with this sorta subject matter/content would be passed around your place of work. This is about to get bitter so please take with a grain of salt: I've learned that most people are gossipy and will often not give people the benefit of the doubt. People judge others to bolster their ego and elevate their own social standing. Even if it was something out of your control like childhood trauma, people will still extrapolate their own opinions.
Then there's the "nothing's ever deleted from the internet" trope - even if I needed it taken down and the original uploader agreed, the content could easily exist elsewhere. I guarantee there's people doing reaction content to this.
All-in-all I functionally can't see the benefit of doing one of these outside of $... and I agree with other posters that it's problematic. It reminds me of photography class in college where all of these kids would photograph the homeless. Everyone thought they were brilliant by shining a light on poverty or something.... Really, they were just privileged asshole kids with savior complexes waving money in front of people who didn't have the option to turn it down; only to put these people on display in school galleries where the subject of the photo would never be allowed.
I do totally agree from a moral standpoint though, if I were to do a project like this, $50 is a tiny fraction of what I'd offer people. It's a tiny fraction of what I'd hope to offer _anyone_ working for my artistic vision, let alone the main talent. But I also know not everyone out there thinks like me, and sometimes artists are people I would otherwise call exploitive, immoral, or selfish, but there still remain cases where I believe the world was better off because of their art, even if they themselves were a total jerk.
I think almost any kind of media or art which makes many people more aware of what life is like for the 'underbelly' of society is probably still a good thing overall. Most of all, the last people I'd like making that decision for us are people who only have business incentives anyway, i.e. Google.
Eh, my parents hated each other, and subsequently took a great deal of it out on their kids - both emotionally and physically. Then my father died when I was 14. Within months my mom ended up dating, then married to a felon who had stole from his own pharmacy losing his license... Mom blamed me for her cancer... blah blah blah. I'm enough of a shit-show that I could potentially be content for that channel for trauma.
> I think almost any kind of media or art which makes many people more aware of what life is like for the 'underbelly' of society is probably still a good thing overall.
I share that anecdote because it backs up what you're saying about the value of the content... I've listened to stuff on there that's more the general mental health/generational trauma related stuff and have found it valuable. It helps me feel less isolated hearing people share stories that I can relate to.
I just feel like there's a weird line with addiction and poverty where there's potential conflict of interest - many of the folks who share their story on that channel aren't desperate by any means... I'm just conflicted over those who are =/
Your comment smells a lot like claiming to know what's better for other adults than the choices they make.
Lots of people just want to have a voice, so their story can be heard.
Interview them for free, you're making money without compensating them. Interview them and give them part, you're exploiting them by underpaying them. Interview them and give them all profits, you're enabling their addiction. Give away the non-ad revenue, you're just abusing a tax writeoff. Don't give it away, you're enriching yourself.
Your economic ideology seems quite fluid, and seems to lack internal consistency.
There’s three options for remuneration.
1. Pay nothing
2. Pay them for their time
3. Give them a large cut
If the contention is that they may be junkies then 3 is probably not a great idea, better to give the money to charity.
If the contention is that it’s exploitation then surely 2 is less exploitative than 1.
In the end, giving people a voice who don’t have one currently is the complete opposite of exploitation.
So, on the one hand, we decry the fact that they seem to lack power and agency, while willingly with the other hand we strip them of what agency and power they do have by saying, "shut up, don't spend your money on that, this is for your own good."
Sounds fucked up and abusive to me. The people should talk if they want to. We shouldn't pretend that we know how to mediate that for them. If they want to expand the way they engage economically, and narratively, in society, then I'm not going to step in their way. I think it's good for them, if they want to do it. I think it's good to have their story told.
Maybe we're just unhappy their voices reveal our hypocrisy? Maybe should you think it through before you find a way to condemn-label something that perhaps you're just a little uncomfortable with. Examine yourself first, rather than projecting onto them, trying to further limit their access, is my unsolicited advice. Thanks
But then again even giving voice to class itself may be an incorrect stereotype that's disempowering. Uuhh...It's difficult to find the right language but I think we should just see people as people.
And that's what I'm really speaking to here even if I'm not replying to the intention of the parent comment, it doesn't matter: what I'm saying is still valuable and important.
Unless you see the full picture, how it's all made, all the connections between the people: as an audience member, consuming the content, I mean, you can't tell, no way.
Maybe even being an audience member is exploitative...anyway. So I think you got to err on the side of caution as an outsider who has no idea, and just like not try to impose, and not call for any sort of curtailing of such content under the moral panic that "it's exploitative", which may just a NIMBY sort of way of silencing them "for their own good."
I get a feeling a lot of the people criticizing him haven't watched the channel. I've seen about 50 videos, and honestly cried with a lot of them. They've made me reevaluate my own life and reconsider how hard life is for others. It has also nudged me to donate time and money to particular communities that struck a chord with me.
I think it's great content.
Sounds like the kind of thing someone would be transparent about. As far as I know, there is no evidence that any of his claims are true. They could be, but he has a huge monetary incentive to lie.
Also, his vague language is a bit of a red flag. I put money back into my community when I spend it. But I call that shopping, not altruism.
I have seen him let the Whittaker family buy trolleys full of stuff from Walmart for their house. I have seen that prostitute (Angel maybe?) interviewed a second time after he paid for her rent and gave her money multiple times after the first video and it turned out she was just giving it to her pimp (and she doesn't refute any of this on camera).
So does he deserve total faith based trust, no, but it's easy to see enough of his videos where they are clearly benefiting from the funds and that's probably enough for many of us to say it's net positive.
Perhaps you should spend 5 minutes researching what you know nothing about before you opine about it. In particular, there is a poor, inbred family in Appalachia that he has visited (and befriended) several times over the years and that the funds he raised have helped them move from their dilapidated trailer into an actual house, among other things.
Is that person having troubled relationship with percentage ? ( real question , I think I heard about that channel once before )
While demonetization isn’t technically censorship, it is discouragement and disincentivizing, which can have a similar effect as censorship without its messiness.
The recent case of the father sending groin region photographs to doctor via google (?) services and being flagged for "inapropriate child content" is one example of where exceptions should be made.
I'm now aware of this channel - I have no issue with its content and feel it should have as much access to income streams as any other vlogger.
There are audiences for all manner of content, surgeons have an interest in "gore" videos that relates to injury, treatment, and things often pixelated out.
Those in the social sciences want to see stories such as these in this channel to better understand issues and impacts of policy.
This is an area that needs better human judgement and oversight, if youtube wants to deter OnlyFansOG style videos then they should do so in a manner that doesn't also swat channels such as this example.
To avoid making their customers angry, YouTube doesn’t show any ads next to videos that have anything to do with sex.
Next, because these videos don’t provide any revenue for YouTube they don’t have a big incentive to keep them online. In fact they do have an incentive to be quick at pulling them down.
Aye there's the rub. Not everyone thinks the way you do.
Finally, sex-related content is a hot button issue related to children. One "sex positive" state, California, just passed a law to come up with yet another way to "protect the children". If you demonetize all of the content with broad strokes you can go to the states and say you comply with their rules.
It's far, far more complicated than "collective normalization". One could even argue that could have blowback that we can't measure. Sex-related content extends far beyond a simple female breast or a tutorial on using a condom.
Imagine if instead, it was framed as: "YouTube makes money off YouTubers' content; their 45% cut is entirely parasitic, YouTube is price-gouging and rent-seeking due to stronger network effects than any other platform on Earth; and YouTube creators are entitled to keep 100% (or, let's say 90% after hosting and fees) of the revenue they generate, not 55%." (yeah, Google's cut is 45%, not 30%, hah. 30% is practically a gift.)
See how bad that would be for Google? So they go all in on the colorful, bubbly, "we care about you"-teddy-bear, 'Sleeping Giants' train, because they'd rather have progressivism than "Marxism." I just wonder how it's been so effective, and why they garner so much less criticism than the App Store for doing far worse (there's no "video platform duopoly" unlike App Stores, it's just a monopoly).
If YouTube's advertisers don't want to be funding more arty or niche content, then there needs to be a 2nd platform that caters to arty content and has niche advertisers. This stuff that is getting demonitised all looks pretty interesting, there has to be a market here that YouTube is giving up. Even if maybe it is small.
I think it's important to be very clear on the correct timeline. Tiny activist groups like "Sleeping Giants" put pressure on advertisers, and got a hashtag trending (back when it was easy to get hashtags trending, before Twitter changed it so that they had to manually approve each hashtag before it showed up on the right-hand sidebar). A few advertisers listened, and pulled their ads from YouTube. It was obviously absolutely incredibly insanely obvious that they were bluffing. YouTube is the most-visited site in the world after Google Search. But YouTube folded instead of calling their bluff; now here we are.
This isn't something anybody really wanted. Advertisers did it to look good for a few days on Twitter, in a very low-ad-spend period anyway (didn't cost them anything). They were planning on letting YouTube make a tiny concession, and resuming their ads. YouTube didn't have to fold; they just panicked. They could have given Fortune 500 advertisers the ability to blacklist channels their ads appear on, and it would have gone away. They mismanaged that crisis completely (and it was far from the last).
>They could have given Fortune 500 advertisers the ability to blacklist channels their ads appear on
That's just... I don't have words to describe,but the sheer laziness in failing to write what any non expert outsider would probably write down among the first few obvious requirements for a advertising platform, is stunning.
I witnessed it in real-time and discussed it with marketer/advertiser friends who have good industry knowledge. I don't know if anyone documented the behind-the-scenes. Note that I may have misremembered the name of the main group behind it (might not have been Sleeping Giants back then).
YouTube isn't banning the content, they're just saying they can't show ads next to it which honestly, seems like common sense.
It's a PR solution; it's not supposed to please engineering, systematizing left-brained people, but to calm down a Twitter mob. YouTube had more than enough market power to simply force advertisers to comply, and advertisers were begging to be given a tiny concession in order to end their boycott while saving face.
This solution would have avoided the adpocalypse entirely.
What does the an advertiser having to spend countless hours finding which channels they don't want to be associated with have to do with engineering? Nothing.
"It's not supposed to please engineering-minded people, systematizing people, left-brained people." I'm talking people like you, who indeed don't think like the advertisers who just wanted a braindead controversy to go away; solving it was unnecessary for YouTube or for advertisers.
YouTube's official position is that the monetization status of a video is not a factor in search and discovery, and that is probably true. But according to YouTube, all of the factors that impact advertiser friendliness (read: monetization) are factors in search and discovery.
My uncle was a daily heroin user most of his adulthood. I remember him telling me one of his only regrets is not finding heroin sooner, it was the only thing that made him happy. It brought (synthetic) joy into a life which a poor, short, confused, single man in rural ON never would have experienced otherwise. He spent the last couple years of his life shooting up in a cheap rural cottage, financially supported by the government and his extended family. He overdosed many times and died young of cancer, but I do wonder how his story would be interpreted by my more progressive colleagues who like to talk about addiction as if all we need to solve the problem are safe injection sites, less cops, and more lenient sentencing. He had the safest injection site imaginable and the incredibly lax Canadian drug laws; it seems like what he needed most was to be part of a society which didn't encourage and enable his choices. I think finding a woman who loved him, even if just for a fleeting moment, might have helped him too. More than anything, I wish my parents had kept going back and hadn't given up and listened to the advice the government workers gave, which was that some people are beyond help, and providing them with their fix and a place to shoot up is the best thing you can do.
Tim was my godfather and my favorite uncle growing up. He's the one who told me some people's brains like drugs so, so much more than others, and if I can, to stay away from them. I miss him all the time.
I think channels like Soft White Underbelly are great because they allow people to form opinions on complicated, human-centric topics without the political and social commentary that come when big corps try to enter the arena. Trust me, if Fox, CNN, Disney, or Buzzfeed were trying to tell Tim's story, you would essentially end up watching an advertisement for an American political party.
Is there something specific you think your parents could have done? It seems like an extraordinarily tall order to externally replace the only source of happiness in someone's life without their co-operation.
I'd probably end up the exact same way. I was hospitalized recently and was given hydrocodone for the first time in my life, I begged the doctor not to give it to me again, regardless of my pain levels, because it was the nicest I remember feeling in years and immediately just wanted more and more. Opiates terrify me like nothing else, largely because I know that if the circumstances were different, I'd probably be telling my future god son the same thing, that there's no better feeling on earth.
It's absolutely a tall order, maybe even an impossible one. I really don't know what I or my parents could have done differently, I just wish Tim was still here.
Safe sites and non-punishment are a means to non-judemental paths to treatment and finding other sources of happiness ... not enablement.
I think all I was trying to say is in my limited experience, addiction and recovery seem to be processes so much better understood at an individual level than they do from a macro perspective. I don't think there's much at all the Canadian government could have done from a legislative or social perspective to bring Tim to recovery, I think my family, given our life-long relationship with him, maybe possibly could have.
Now we have many people depending on money from advertisement. I feel sad about that.
The problem is, now, that any advertiser can run on any video. If I am watching a woodworking video I shouldn't get an ad for dawn soap. It would make sense for a brief ad on tools, or a wood supplier, or something which I might even appreciate because it lets me know something exists.
It's not ads. It's the increased quantity of them and the low signal to noise ratio. Ads are useful, being inundated with them is not. It's further made worse by the average youtube video's quality going straight down to nothing over the 10 years. It's mostly "professionals". At this point, I'd rather go back to watching TV.
Yes, and that's been a horror that Lovecraft and Orwell combined wouldn't comprehend. The uncountable hours of human eyeball time wasted utterly; worse than wasted; used to whitewash the reputations of criminals and scumbags.
For what? To sponsor "news" that itself is a commercial? For TV and radio that leaves people dumber than they'd be without it?
Billionaire media moguls have done very well. Entrenched political interests have done great. Fossil fuel fucks and tobacco companies, pharma and insurance, polluters and propagandists have all done very well indeed - for themselves.
... The rest of us - not so much. Cheap junk, rotting minds, hyper saturated nonsense killing thought itself.
> The difference is that those ads tend to be better targeted
The problem is NOT the targeting. The problem is the unfathomable scale of the negative externalities.
Radio is easier because radio broadcasting is much cheaper. At least over here there are BBC stations (locally and nationally), and things like student and hospital radio that are run by volunteers and have no or minimal advertising.
I'm not saying these models are better than ad-funded media, but the ubiquity of ads isn't an actual prerequisite of media. There have also been subscription channels without advertising (before cable companies decided to double-dip) and you can imagine other funding models like television-as-propaganda (either by an oligarch or an unfriendly state), or as philanthropy (why not run ad-free 'worthy' television as a modern version of the Carnegie Library?)
intrusive misinformation.
As unfortunate as this is, even the channel owner agrees the content does (at least technically) violate the policy
Maybe the larger question is why Youtube is under so much pressure to change old policies that were working for many years
Maybe someone could develop a way to automate some portion making it easier, and it'd be hard to replicate the income from targeted advertisement with click tracking using permanent in video sponsorships, but it seems possible.
But advertisers have a say to where their money goes.
‘Brand Safety’ is a huge thing in advertising and there are companies out there that classify webpages based on their content. Premium advertisers don’t want their ads shown alongside content that can be deemed scandalous or unsafe. Sex obviously falls into this category, a more recent example was Covid-related content; advertisers wanted nothing to do with it.
I’m guessing here, but it seems that YT lacks to ability to guarantee premium advertisers that their ads won’t appear on unsafe content and so they demonitise the whole channel.
That said, the amount of garbage ads I get shown on YT is astounding, I doubt those advertisers care where their ads get shown.
Do people actually think ads mean the company's approve of the messages of the content? It doesn't make sense to me. I don't see a terrorist video and think man Proctor and Gamble sure loves terrorists. An ad is just something unrelated to the content on the page, like the buttons. The YouTube logo is on the page. Does that mean I'm supposed to think YouTube stands behind everything on there? Because that's going to get real problematic real quick.
This seems easily solvable if Google just strong-armed them. Stand up and say "We will serve your ads on all our content or none of it". Like it really seems like they have the demographic advertisers want. There'd be some gnashing of teeth, but they'd get over it I'm sure.
Google, on the other hand, has built a multi-billion empire over the premise that they can show every single ad to potential consumers.
So, when Google is showing your ads to people interested in porn, violence and political controversial topics, it is by extension implying that they are your target audience and the ones your product is designed for.
Forget about "people". "People" don't think anything, do anything, or change anything.
A Twitter account ran by two marketers & copywriters ("Sleeping Giants") copied Gamergate's tactics, went viral, and, by making advertisers fear a botted hashtag damaging their brand, these two marketers singlehandedly made YouTube, Facebook, etc more censorious and delete-happy. The effects are still felt today.
It's one of the best viral marketing experiments run in the 2010s after #Kony2012. Absolutely brilliant.
I think from the advertisers’ perspective it may also be about just wanting to avoid a negative association. If an ad for a product runs on a video of an interview with a prostitute, then there’s a risk that people might form some association (perhaps unconsciously) between that product and prostitution, or even just an association between the product and any negative emotions from watching the video.
It may not be completely logical, but emotions are often not completely logical.
It's like trying to prove god(s) don't exist. You can keep on arguing, but ultimately you can't prove the negative with absolute certainty without going to insane ends.
Youtube's algorithms could be either hot garbage or the best thing since sliced bread, but it doesn't matter. Youtube can never prove certain ads will never play on certain videos, so the only options are to refuse such requests from advertisers (which is unacceptable for Youtube) or just blanket block certain videos from playing ads period.
Yeah except they dont do that. They just play ads and keep all the cash.
Er, what? Sure, they absolutely can, and your god analogy is... not actually analogous. Perhaps YT has chosen not to build a system that allows them fine-grained control over allowing -- or not allowing -- specific ads on specific videos, but that's not the same thing.
It's also sickeningly puritanical to lump these videos in as "sexual content" like it's something exploitative that someone's getting off to. This isn't that at all.
Maybe the world needs an alternative YT for sensitive/alternative content, funded by advertisers that would be ok with it?
Or YT/Google could just not care; what would brands do? Stop advertising on all Google properties? Good luck with that.
There's a certain differences between a public and providing a platform as a private enterprise, and chances are that the commercial interests won't align with what maintaining a public or a true representation of it may afford.
(BTW, HN is doing a great job in providing a platform to a specific public. But this is only, because HN is not the primary source of income for Y Combinator. Rather, this is a strategic investment, which happens to strategically align itself with the interests of this specific public. But I doubt if this could serve as a general blueprint. And it could be gone in a moment.)
I wouldn't be surprised to see criminal charges at some point in the future.
Patient brokerage is a serious area of organized corruption within our medical system and it's disgusting.
Lima's program has a 6 step process where step 1 is "conservatorship or jail".
TL;DR - It's someone who was involved in the videos at one point, runs a new-style recovery program, patient from video attends recovery program, dies under odd circumstances. SWU does not give much detail post-events.
To help others, the first result I found about this Lima Jevremovic character was:
> Founder, Lima Mora has lived through the implications of severe mental health illness first hand through loved ones. The Jevremovic Institute of Behavior and Brain Sciences (JIBBS) was bloomed from a desire to create tools to improve mental healthcare, research and innovations and make those tools available globally to all that need them.
A Mixed Reality Experience Designer, Mora specializes in Digital Health. She is well known in the tech community for her speaking engagements and role as an ambassador for bridging innovative technology with healthcare and providing insight on the emerging markets of VR/AR and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Seems like another entrepreneur trying to make it in the exhausting scene of health digitalization. What am I missing here?
And just because people may like this channel doesn't mean it's actually a positive thing. Everyone likes watching train wrecks, afterall.
Mark Laita's channel is pretty exploitative and IMO has no place on YouTube. Soft White Underbelly is a lot like people rubbernecking a car crash.
Most folks on here don't have the interest or time to research random YouTubers we've never heard of. Clearly it's an area you feel strongly about, so spending an additional 30s writing an explanation for why people on HN _should_ care, or where they should look, is a great start. Thanks again!
Every online micro-niche always attracts huge drama; whether travel vlogging, some zen Buddhist forums, "truecrime" fans, TCAP fans. How likely you are to encounter drama has zero correlation to how justified the drama is; its' just omnipresent.
Recently he had a bit of a scandal where he'd been funneling a massive amount of cash to a sex worker who was exploiting him for it, she in turn being exploited by her pimp who was taking the cash.
We simply take the your income and payment options.
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You can say want you want but sooner or later you run out of money. Free but broke