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Comment by chapill | Hacker News Reader

Why not indeed. Advertisers in general don't want to be associated with extremists of any stripe.

From the linked opinion piece in the story:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po...

"YouTube leads viewers down a rabbit hole of extremism, while Google racks up the ad sales."

So the big question is, why not demonetize them? Removing all ads probably has a pretty significant impact on the algorithm already.

Why doesn't YouTube do the right thing? Stop making money on extremists? It seems like doing that would auto correct the problems.

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They did that months ago. The whole 'adpocalypse'. You can not get ad money on anything even remotely controversial on youtube. Recently they've taken down tons of gun channels among other things.

I guess the devs tested with their adblock enabled,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHxHTPDrwVM

I see an ad for a video game beside the video on this page.

https://i.imgur.com/eV5Vz5Z.jpg

I'm sure I could find plenty more examples.

Youtube has several levels of monetization. Some videos can still run ads, but only with advertisers that opt into it. They are really low paying ads and the creators make a fraction of the regular rate on it.

Also what in particular is wrong with this video? I don't have time to watch the whole thing. I thought the controversy was over "crisis actor" conspiracy theories especially. Which accuse victims of notable tragedies as being paid actors. And that sometimes result in them being harassed and mocked. And most of those videos are very quickly deleted from youtube as it is. Videos even mentioning their names or debunking the conspiracy theories are getting removed too.

I'm not sure if anyone really cares about random conspiracies about how much the CIA hates Julian Assange. Which may very well be true and doesn't offend anyone.

How would you define an "extremist of any type"?

Is someone who promotes a keto diet on YouTube an extremist following your logic? (considering they'd be pretty far outside the "common view" both of the population at large and of the medical community)

I imagine the videos of that keto guy wouldn't look too "advertiser-friendly" to Coke or McDonalds.

I, for one, hope YouTube actually follows your suggestion. The sooner the better. Then it can finally turn into GrandmaTV (its ultimate slow-motion goal, probably), and everyone will start leaving it, following their favorite creators to more decentralized and more censorship-free platforms like d.tube.

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