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Comment by Sophistifunk | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't really matter what their argument is, they simply need to have one. It's their sandbox, and they have chosen an advertiser-friendly ratchet as the driver of policy. YouTube will get more and more bland and samey as people fear the banhammer, which will get used on less and less extreme content and producers, as the "cancelling machinery" has been built and will always find the next-most-evil^tm on which to focus.

Until YouTube becomes boring and enough interesting people end up together somewhere else, and then all the users will leave at once (in internet time).

Doctorow huffs his own farts at a James Cameron level, but he's right about this.

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>In England and Wales, more than 99% of rapes reported to police do not end in a conviction. This is the result of a criminal justice system that makes prosecuting rape extremely rare, lengthy and difficult.

https://www.city.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2022/04/new-scor...

An alternative interpretation of what's going on here is that the mainstream justice system is failing, and people are cobbling together an alternative justice system, where public shaming and demonetization are the punishments.

I think building in redundancy to reduce single points of failure is generally a good thing.

I get where you’re coming from, but YouTube doesn’t care about justice. They care about reputational harm and ultimately profits. So if that means demonetizing a victim because that’s what’s profitable, they’ll do that. If it means demonetizing an innocent but unpopular person, they’ll do that. A guilty person not being punished isn’t the only failure mode.

I hadn't thought of it as a redundancy, Thanks for the perspective shift. It is damming however that our institutions have become so useless and out of reach to the majority of people that we have to implement these obviously flawed system.

There's a word for that: vigilantism, a word not usually associated with fairness, accountability, or proportionate punishment. That there are voices here that suggest private punishment administered without accountability or due process is, to quote the parent poster, "a good thing" should worry us all.

There's another alternative interpretation, which is that those rape reports are false or disingenuous.

If you think advertiser sensibilities and internet mobs should play any sort of part in a just justice system, I don't know what to tell you.

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