Hacker News Reader

Comment by dihydro | Hacker News Reader

Youtube will say "Oh, we can't pick and choose because then unscrupulous channels will tag their garbage videos as CPR and not get ads, or the search quality will go down."

This is utter BS, because we know they have the tools to boost or suppress individual channels, so YT needs to vet existing channels, and flag them as ad free or important for search. A channel and video that comes to mind is the Red Cross' CPR instructional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eRwgM2Pa4o

View on HN

You used to be able to tell YouTube you don’t want it to show ads on your videos nor to give you money in return. How you can’t refuse the ads[1]. Good news—you can still refuse the money! /s Presumably the Red Cross channel is from those earlier times.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/youtube-will-put-ads-on-non-...

I never considered paying for YouTube premium to avoid ads a health and safety matter, but I guess in this case it would be.

Youtube does already have this functionality.

The following Youtube video will never display ads, by contractual agreement.

Gotye - Somebody That I Used To Know (feat. Kimbra) [Official Music Video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UVNT4wvIGY

Yep... they manage to find curse words, any mention of "the plague", anything on the "wrong" political side, and demonetize immediately... but asking for red cross videos to be on top and without ads is "too much" for them.

I think YouTube should make it easier, I even think it’s technically feasible to do it. but I also think the finger wagging is massively misplaced.

We shouldn’t punish folks or companies for doing something good just because they aren’t doing it even better. “No good deed goes unpunished” is not supposed to be a rule we intentionally follow! That’s the path to insanity, yet it seems like many people unironically believe it.

It occurs to me that this should actually be one of those searches that has a curated infobox above the search results, and probably including a button that calls emergency services since doing that is step 1 of every cpr training program I have ever taken.

The only "responsible" reaction from youtube would be to add a popup or notification when someone is looking for emergency videos that they should call emergency services and ask for instructions

This person called emergency services and then went on youtube. They didn't ask for instructions and the emergency service didn't think to offer it.

Why not actually make that feature mandatory on OS level? If it notices that you type how to perform cpr or any misstyping, immediately call emergency number and start showing a video stored in the OS itself. Why do Apple and Google want to kill people? Why don't they implement this sort of reasonable feature?

This seems like a simple case of pinning a Red Cross/Crescent video to the top of searches which may resemble emergency instructions.

You took that straw man down real good

Reply on news.ycombinator.com