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Comment by edwardbernays | Hacker News Reader

Nah, he transparently accepted money from waymo to peddle propaganda. Once somebody takes propaganda money, there's no trusting them anymore. From then on out, everything they do is in service to propaganda paymasters. Even just doing regular, good quality work can only be viewed through the lens of acquiring social capital to liquidate into financial capital later.

See: Brian Keating licking Eric Weinstein's jock strap in public and then offering mild criticism on Piers Morgan.

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You are essentially saying any creator that has ever done sponsored content becomes a creator non-grata. I somewhat disagree with that. Sponsored content is a perverse incentive but it's also important to understand that creators can pick and choose for what they make sponsored content. So if you have an ethical creator can create sponsored content of a product they agree is actually that good. Well now the question is "How can you tell". And I don't think you generally can. Some people are really good at lying. In the end it's really about do you trust this creator or not. Which is what's it's about regardless if they took a sponsorship or not.

> Well now the question is "How can you tell". And I don't think you generally can.

You can, actually, with a simple rule of thumb: if it's being advertised on YouTube, it's statistically low quality or a scam. The sheer number of brands that sponsor videos just to be exposed later for doing something shady is just too high.

That's the point. You can't tell. Applying a low resolution filter like you are proposing will filter out a ton of worthwhile products. Here is just a small list of products you can no longer buy if you subscribe to your philosophy: apple, dell, HP, framework, tuxedo and basically almost all laptop manufacturers. The same goes for smartphones. No GPUs at all for you. The filter is so crude it fails spectacularly at what it should be doing.

Perhaps a more fitting variant would be that the trustworthiness decreases with increasing number of sponsored channels and ad frequency. Although I have never seen any video directly sponsored by Apple, Dell or HP for example, same for GPUs and many smartphone brands. They provide free units for review at most, and those at least go to channels with fitting content and the trustworthiness can be judged more easily. Whereas some new brand you never heard of aggressively sponsoring videos of every major channel for months basically guarantees there's something wrong with the company, product or both.

I thought it goes without saying that I don't mean ads shown directly by YouTube, if you don't already block those in 2025 I don't know what to say.

Sponsored content is fine. Sponsored content with improper public disclosure, or with irresponsible claims that do not reflect reality, is not fine. Super simple standard: if they lie or substantively misrepresent for a sponsor, they can no longer be trusted.

> transparently accepted money from waymo to peddle propaganda

If transparent enough (and not from an abhorrent source), I'd be ok with his product. He's even allowed to make the occasional mistake as long as he properly owns up to it.

Theres been a lot of valuable learning from him and it would be a pity to dismiss it all over a single fumble.

Lying or misrepresenting a product for a paycheck is not a fumble. It's a propagandist making a bag. Once they have put effort into creating a polished piece of propaganda, which they then release, it can not be considered a fumble any longer. It is something that they endorse. If they rescind it within some critical window that meaningfully impacts their bottom-line, maybe then I can believe them. Otherwise? No, I see no reason to offer them the benefit of the doubt. There are many people doing actually good work. Veritasium is not unique in their content or quality. We should not reward propagandists.

I agree that Waymo video was probably a poor decision. He does say that the video is sponsored but it just comes off a bit odd. It's not uncommon that youtubers are paid either in money or access - Destin for example gets access to military sites and technology on his channel with it being a semi-explicit tool for recruiting.

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