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Comment by ranger207 | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of comments in here about the video being age restricted because of the cursing, but the real story here is the inconsistency in YouTube's moderation. SummoningSalt's video has one section where there's 6 f-bombs dropped in 3 seconds, which is what YouTube explicitly called out the second time the video was age-restricted. But the video was reinstated the first time: why did they reinstate it and then change their mind later? Furthermore, despite the density of cursing in that one segment, overall the video has less curse density than other comparable videos. Why is SummoningSalt's video age-restricted but not videos from the Angry Video Game Nerd, whose whole schtick is heavy use of profanity? Is the issue really just the use of so many curse words in such a short amount of time? That seems to be a really weird rule to have

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Yeah his pinned comment which is copied at the end of the article is a perfect summary. It's not a problem to age restrict videos, but their content guidelines should actually reflect the criteria they use for that. The content guidelines actually say some profanity is okay, but excessive use will get you restricted. Salt's video had a 3 second clip in a video over an hour long.

Had he known the real criteria ahead of time, he would have bleeped it. Now it's too late to fix the profanity because it's also been flagged as containing Sex and Nudity. In a Megaman 2 video.

> Why is SummoningSalt's video age-restricted but not videos from the Angry Video Game Nerd, whose whole schtick is heavy use of profanity?

Maybe YouTube works on a South Park system. Broadcasters didn't like them saying "shit" a couple times. So they repeated it 150+ times and kept count on screen.

> There's a lot of comments in here about the video being age restricted because of the cursing, but the real story here is the inconsistency in YouTube's moderation. [...] less curse density than other comparable videos.

This argument never flies with rule-enforcers. I don't know why people keep trying it. You hear it a lot as well about Apple's AppStore reviewing: "Why did you reject my App A when my competitor's App B which does the same thing was approved?" Having worked with AppStore approval, bringing up other apps to compare to never helps. The same is true for forum content moderation, copyright strikes, social media moderation, and so on. The response will always be "I am looking at your content, not that other content." It never makes sense to reach for the "inconsistency" argument. It will always fall on deaf ears.

It's like arguing with the cop who pulled you over for speeding by saying "but look at all the other cars that are speeding even faster!" No cop in the history of copping has ever been swayed by that argument.

1. As he explains, YouTube's rules don't actually instruct creators to censor these types of outbursts, and he can site numerous examples of content by more well-known creators that are much more explicit than the 3-second clip.

2. After reversing their decision, Youtube has re-restricted the video because they now claim it contains nudity/sexual content. How does that tie into your argument, exactly?

If they would accept the video with bleeps, why don't they just offer to bleep it. Then they could give uncensored versions to signed in adults who choose it?

As I said, they already falsely banned it again, this time for nudity even though there is no nudity. Is that enough to just admit that the system is completely broken?

As he explained, he would have been more than happy to bleep those 3 seconds in the first place if that was the policy. But as he pointed out, the policy only gives more severe examples than what was contained in his video. The point is that there should have been a realistic way for him to know it would break policy.

In this case, the damage is done. He slaved away for months on this video only to have lost thousands of dollars in ad revenue that can’t be recovered.

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