YouTube Is Removing Some Nootropics Channels
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
Magnesium isn't even a nootropic. That is, while it may have some ability to boost cognition, it isn't a substance primarily ingested for that reason. It is a substance primarily ingested so that the person ingesting it will stay alive.
A quick cruise around Duck Duck Go suggests that while science isn't saying you should use magnesium for sleep per se, it isn't necessarily a crazy idea in desperate need of being censored. Certainly the idea that magnesium is generally deficient is widespread, with estimates around 50% not meeting the US RDA for magnesium in the US, and while magnesium may not be a good solution for insomnia qua insomnia, it can be a good solution for many things that may be causing you to be "unable to sleep"[1], whether or not that is "insomnia".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_deficiency_(medicine...
It would help if YouTube would say so. I'm not sure Google's usual total opacity is going to play to their favor here. As I said in another comment, I personally see no reason to trust their judgment in these matters, but if they said "Hey, we're getting regulatory pressure from X about Y and we need to remove your stuff" that would be a step in the direction of restoring my trust. (I've got other reasons I'm very unlikely to ever trust them very much overall, but I am capable of nuance, so I have no problem saying I would at least trust them more.)
The article then goes on to name several videos with titles like "increase energy," "improve concentration and memory," "improve sleep," etc.
Are there any lawyers around who know of a legal definition for "medical advice" or "medical claims?" Because these videos sound a lot like medical advice despite his insistence that they aren't.
Youtube censorship sucks sometimes, but this guy experimenting on himself is not nearly rigorous enough to figure out what's really happening when he is taking these supplements. When a person sets out to improve themselves with drugs, test the process on themselves, and interpret and analyze those results themselves, it's a viper's pit of biases. Obviously the experimenter has a huge personal stake in the experiment (arguably the largest; his person is the experiment!) and that generally is great for motivation but bad for science.
I like playing with nootropics but I'm also relatively healthy and I can't imagine how damaging it might be for a seriously ill person who is taking advice from youtube in a desperate and futile attempt to improve their condition and survive. The ethics are pretty complex, above my pay grade for sure.
If you're talking about the FDA, the basic rule is that you can't claim a product treats or cures any diagnosable condition it hasn't been certified for. Claims like "improve concentration" and "improve sleep" are generally permissible, where specific statements like "helps with ADD" and "cures insomnia" are not.
Based on those video titles, I don't see anything which constitutes medical advice in the narrow sense. Someone could well have decided the overall effect was tacit medical advice, but these titles in isolation aren't clear violations.
Any time you see something non-specific like "boosts the immune system" or "increases energy" it means the product is likely worthless because those claims don't actually mean anything.
It's the reason so many "nutrition" companies can get away with claiming all kinds of things such as "burn fat faster". That statement means something to you and I, but it's not a medical statement.
They might be "meaningless" to actual medical professionals or people with decent knowledge of the ways that companies skirt product labelling laws. But the average layperson who might buy these products is probably neither of those things and is more likely to interpret them literally.
Sweetmyx has zero embryo cells in it. The embryo cells were used to test how the human taste receptors would respond to Sweetmyx.
For the record, I think anyone peddling pseudoscience regarding medical conditions should be shutdown hard and fast. People who suffer from chronic pain or incurable illness can become desperate and turn to charlatans whose snake-oil can produce terrible effects. It isn't harmless to prey on such insecurities.
You can't eradicate the nonsense you can just change its nature. In some ways I think having complete nonsense out there is healthy in terms of promoting skepticism amongst normal people.
In the past year I've gone from suffering heart problems so bad that I was becoming completely unable to sleep at night to having them nearly fixed [1]. (Point here being, we are waaaay beyond anything "placebo" could possibly do. Bright, shining, clear-as-day signals here.) I've done this by finding information from various sources about supplements that can address these problems.
Now, being a HN denizen and reasonably rational, I've done this by figuring out nutritional deficiencies and reading various papers. So I'm not taking random herbs or anything; I'm taking amino acids and magnesium and some other things that I can find various papers that suggest that they may help. I can even find actual doctors who seem to be quite reasonable and respected in their field recommending the core of regimen I'm on, so I'm far away from looney-land. However, in strict scientific terms, that is as far as science has gotten... some papers that suggest that further research is necessary, but said further research has not (as far as I can tell) been done yet, and substantial case reports from doctors but not much in the way of formal studies.
Everything I've tried, generally speaking the worst case scenario is that Nothing Happens, the upside is "maybe my heart will start working better", and the monetary cost has been negligible to me, so I've been able to work through things and figure out what helps, and the things that didn't help my particular problem.
(It is often pointed out that drug companies have little incentive to study the effectiveness of unpatentable substances on disease. My Celiac may be skewing the results, but based on the digging I've done into may various issues over the years, I have to say that it certainly appears to me that there is good reason to believe that there are a lot of cures, treatments, and ameliorations available for a whole host of diseases that are often studied in a cheap paper with a small sample size, or even in the form of case studies, but that are never followed up on because nobody's got the funding if it isn't going to produce a drug. If you've got something even slightly rare and you aren't getting a good treatment, I highly recommend trawling through the sludge of the internet and filtering it through a scientific understanding. You may be surprised at what you can find. You'll certainly find sludge, but there may be unexpected diamonds in there. Very often many of the interventions carry little risk beyond not working and are very cheap to try. I always double-check and triple-check the risks first, but sometimes it's as simple as "have you tried vitamin B supplements?" or something, where the risks are generally very well understood.)
But drawing a bright shining line between the resources I used to do this and "psuedoscience" is going to be very, very difficult. In fact at times the two were outright mixed together, and I had to untangle them myself. Yes, we know the worst stuff when we see it, absolutely, and I am not suggesting this space should be unregulated. However, I am suggesting that free speech is still a concern here, and I will personally be very unhappy if you lop what could very well be 30 years off my life in the name of "protecting" me.
Is it a challenge to filter this stuff correctly? Yeah. Nobody said life would be easy.
[1]: Conventional medicine put me on a heart monitor for a month and proceeded to announce to me that it was all normal that my heart was beating so wrongly that it was literally keeping me up at night. I have to admit this was definitely a bit of a blow in my confidence in the medical field. It all worked out for the best in the end anyhow; fixing the underlying deficiencies is a better idea that trying to take any medication to patch over the broken system, which is probably what would have happened. As my own further digging into the problem revealed, heart arrhythmia medicine can be a lifesaver in some circumstances, but it is also almost as like to cause the problems as to improve them. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have helped me, because my problem was, again, missing nutrients, and generally you can't medicine over that.
(So, for the aforementioned reasons, I don't have an official diagnosis, but I'm pretty sure it would be called "Vagal Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation". My mother suffers from AF, though I'm not sure of the exact subclassification, and I get my celiac from my father, so... yay genes.)
I don't understand how she keeps escaping being shutdown or even arrested.
The Canadian government just banned a Naturopath product with actual rabies saliva in it which was used to treat children. At least there's progress.
so highly regulated that I can buy a one-time dose vial of mystery liquid at my local liquor store that promises harder erections and improved cognition, without the active ingredients printed anywhere.
If this was triggered by pressure from any group like the FDA, i'd sure be curious why they decided to start regulating medical woo-woo at the YouTube level, and not at the "homeopath that can cure any cancer" level, which is totally prevalent in the U.S.
When I had a commute I used to count the car windshield banner stickers that advertised the sale of miracle juices, berrys, extracts, whatever. Those 'Avon-esque' pyramid schemes are dangerous from both sides -- both for suckers that get pulled in as sellers , and for the folks consuming the stuff hoping to cure colon cancer, but that stuff is still as prevalent as ever..
When, exactly, does western medical regulation kick in? It seems to be when you're making lots of money on-shore.
If that’s your version of very clear, maybe you shouldn’t be giving people advice.
Learn how magnesium may relax and improve your sleep
First result: The effect of magnesium supplementation on primary insomnia in elderly: A double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial.
CONCLUSION:
Supplementation of magnesium appears to improve subjective measures of insomnia such as ISI score, sleep efficiency, sleep time and sleep onset latency, early morning awakening, and likewise, insomnia objective measures such as concentration of serum renin, melatonin, and serum cortisol, in elderly people.
btw I was a fan of Steve Cronin's channel and of reddit's nootropics subreddit. Steve's stuff was hardly experimental. Lots of this stuff is heavily researched. Youtube probably has input from Big Pharma. What's next, eliminating smoothy and juicing videos? Vegan recipes? Will they let themselves become a perfect shady of the corporate lifestyle?
I hope you find a new venture in your Ikegai!!!!
And I suspect that they want to make money even more than they want to reshape the culture into the image of what they think it should be...
>And I suspect that they want to make money even more than they want to reshape the culture into the image of what they think it should be...
Groups often do this to secure future profits at the cost of current profits. It would be to the advantage of YT to reduce costs by funneling as many users as they can to the same result, allowing for the reduction of dynamic elements within their structure.
It could be that they are juggling total lost customers with a total cost of operation and trying to achieve a more profitable ratio with cheaper/easier to substantiate channels/results
tl;dr : Google would be cheaper to run if there were only 20 results. Google would be #1 if they could keep their current audience happy with that style of operation, due to the disparity in income versus outward expenses.
Maybe some group of psychologists is discussing what channels to bar next that won't hurt the bottom line...
(but, like I said in the beginning , I doubt it very much -- it's just a fun exercise to imagine why they would want to destroy content)
Therefore culture shaping and profit are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they both reinforce each other.
To accomplish great things, it was believed, those leaders have to take the reigns and direct the commoners or else they would tear themselves apart in anarchy. A great many of the upper class still believe this to be the situation (which is partially psychological self defense, believing that they were simply lucky would lead to many feeling very bad about having so much more than almost everyone else). While something like YouTube becoming a way for tons of people to make a decent living, and that becoming the dominant means through which media is created and consumed, as opposed to centralization of media production and consumption under a handful of more directly controlled companies sounds like a renaissance to most people, to them it sounds like outrageous stupidity. It sounds like letting the rats chew through one of the pillars holding our society aloft.
taking nutritional supplements without any evidence that they accomplish anything useful and without a physician's advice is generally a bad idea (the default mode is not 'take until suggested otherwise' but 'only take if necessary'), and trying to make money off it by marketing them on youtube is even more miserable.
I'm very much in favour of youtube taking a proactive stance here. As a related note on nootropics, most of the products advertised under that label don't actually do anything at all. There's two very well known nootropics, caffeine and nicotine. So the next time someone tries to sell you weird nutrition supplements, just get a good old cup of coffee.
One of the patents on my ward was an OAP who had been taking a lot of Zinc which reacted with the meds he was on and it Totally shut down his Kidneys FFS.
or maybe you have a sample size of one?
You want to try risking total renal failure go ahead - or are you a pusher with no concern for your punters health.
Btw they put you on the transplant list way before you get to this point which this person did to himself.
"Symptoms of magnesium deficiency include ... insomnia" and "57% of the US population does not meet the US RDA for dietary intake of magnesium."
I don't know what was in the video beyond its title, but the title is solidly inside the bounds of established science.
Magnesium deficiency may be a documented problem, with documented symptoms. Taking magnesium to correct it may have unfortunate side effects, due to other drugs that you're taking, or other conditions that you may have.
YouTube is on borrowed time (as is all social media) in skirting regulations that normally were enforced on TV and radio. It will catch up with YouTube, Instagram, etc and they are realizing it and trying to prepare.
In the fitness community ZMA is widely considered a sleep aid.
This is not censorship in the way we have traditionally understood. It only feels like it because Youtube is where the biggest audience is. It's the same whenever Facebook penalizes a post in the timeline, or whenever Google hides content from the search results. They feel like a the phone company or the post office - neutral platforms where people expect the right to free speech. In reality, they are publishers that exercise editorial discretion.
If we had focused on building decentralized platforms with interoperability and open standards, this wouldn't be an issue. Instead, you all wanted to make money. (Understandable)
My proposal - the government should recognize that network effects produce defacto monopolies, and use existing anti-trust law to break up these behemoth platforms, or force regulation on them.
In the mean time, I'll shout "i told you so" from my lonely, facebookless, linux-powered compound.
I need to get my ham license one of these days.
Where do you think you are? ;)
A ham license is a great idea given where things are headed. Might even be worthwhile to set up a functional sneakernet among friends as a hobby. Something like FidoNet over USB sticks?
With regard to the rest of your comment, I'm not confident breaking up the google 'monopoly' would actually solve this problem. If you spun youtube off as its own company distinct from the rest of google, wouldn't it still have a virtual monopoly on this user-uploaded online video space? How would you actually solve that? Split youtube itself into several "Baby Youtubes"? How would that work, which one would get the domain name?
It's not. Private companies can attempt to silence people.
But Youtube isn't preventing the creators from hosting content elsewhere. They aren't hitting them with a slapp lawsuit. They aren't colluding with other websites to ban these videos.
Youtube is just saying "host these somewhere else." How is that different from a publishing company choosing not to publish a book?
Well it is a little different. For the reason I mentioned in my post. Because youtube is the only game in town.
> I'm not confident breaking up the google 'monopoly' would actually solve this problem.
The problem, in my eyes, is that youtube can ban you, and there is no alternative place to host your videos with the same level of exposure. Having a competitive market place would solve this problem, and give video hosting sites an incentive to treat creators fairly.
Again, you're not refuting anything that anybody here actually thinks.
>"Well it is a little different. For the reason I mentioned in my post. Because youtube is the only game in town."
Exactly, which is why the devil's advocate routine is so tiring.
>"The problem, in my eyes, is that youtube can ban you, and there is no alternative place to host your videos with the same level of exposure. Having a competitive market place would solve this problem, and give video hosting sites an incentive to treat creators fairly."
I agree, but how could that actually be accomplished? If the government split up google/youtube like they split Bell, what would go to who? Would one of the Baby Youtube's get the "youtube" domain/brand? Or could they all? Would youtube.com just give you a "web portal" that impartially linked to all the various Baby Youtubes that were created by fracturing youtube? Would third party video websites unrelated to the youtube breakup get a place on that web portal?
And you aren't refuting what I said. How is this any different than a book publisher deciding what books to publish? Are you saying youtube and other websites should be forced to host content they don't agree with? Should HN be held to the same rules? How would that work?
And the way to get that is to start using the alternative sites. If everyone is going to continue to use YouTube to host their videos, nothings going to change.
One has a penalty of shutting you up, the other of shutting you up, fining you, and or jailing you.
They shouldn't be conflated as the same type of censorship.
I'm just spitballing here, but if Youtube were handed over to the United States Postal Service (which has a reasonable but far from untarnished reputation for being content neutral. probably a better recent track record than google's), maybe that would be an improvement. Using tax dollars to subsidize a content neutral video platform would raise a lot of questions though, no least of which being how to handle monetization so that content producers get paid for what they upload. If the replacement platform can't compensate content producers, I don't think it will succeed. And of course it would also open the platform up to government directed censorship which can have more serious consequences than corporate directed censorship, but on the other hand gives the censored an arguably better chance of rectifying the situation through the courts. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_censorship#Countries_kn...)
Google's entire business model seems to be to operate everything as a loss-leader for AdSense. It turns out that that's extremely anti-competitive and I'm growing to think that it probably should be illegal.
The only way that anyone can compete with the free services that Google provides is to run it off the profits from a massive cash cow like AdSense. Until somebody finds some service/revenue model that provides that, it's just not going to happen.
The only way that anyone can compete with AdSense is to own users interactions with the browser like Google's free services do. Until somebody owns that much of your traffic, no-one will compete with AdSense.
I'm far from confident that nationalization is the answer, but I don't know what is. I think we're perhaps dealing with a new sort of problem that requires a new sort of solution, that has yet to be devised.
Given the little I know about Facebook's server infrastructure, they don't really have the capability to deliver a "Baby Youtube" anytime soon. They don't have the physical space available for the hardware they'd need and if they did it would rapidly be absorbed by their larger teams who need it already. Plus they just don't do high quality video well. That combined with the visibility limitations of the feed don't really make it a great platform for self-branding, unless you're willing to shell out major cash for promotion.
Amazon makes more sense as Twitch is already a good analogue for Youtube. It also pairs well with their budding media empire. That said, Twitch actually brings in money -- it doesn't depend entirely on subsidy to function.
I think what I'm getting at, ultimately, is that hosting your own video content probably shouldn't be free. I'm sort of tonedeaf to complaints over the streaming Adpocalypse because these streamers/person-brands exist purely through advertising subsidy in the first place. If the quality of your content is good, it's worth paying for distribution (and/or self-hosting) because you will see a return.
So it turns out that Vimeo is probably the right choice. Reviewing their content guidelines, it seems as though most of the commercial content that has been kicked off other platforms fine as long as it isn't spammy or sexually explicit.
It's not pedantic, it is patently false.
Wikipedia: "Governments and private organizations may engage in censorship"
Merriam Webster: Censor: "a person who supervises conduct and morals"
Dictionary.com: Censor: "any person who supervises the manners or morality of others"
ACLU: "Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups"
The confusion seems common to America, where the constitution is seen as the source of the rights, rather than as a document referencing pre existing ideals.
Not OP, but IMO breaking Google into smaller chunks would increase responsibility on each smaller chunk to provide a pro-customer experience, and require specific (and slower to act) government requests to affect large swathes of data. Smaller corporations simply can't afford to screw users as quickly or in such numbers as mega-groups.
Right now, 'Google' can be asked to affect data for many services? Is that good? It doesn't feel good to me.
Having a large backing company , in nearly every instance i've encountered it, reduces overall customer satisfaction, reduces communications between company and consumer to as bare minimum as possible, and makes the service much more likely to attract, and fold to, government pressure.
A big chunk of our culture is hosted by that company. Not sure if that makes a difference, but imho, it should.
Why is such a big chunk of our culture is hosted by a private company?
> Instead, you all wanted to make money. (Understandable)
There isn't as much margin in self hosting and dumb pipes
It’s a bit concerning that you mention being hosted by a “private” company. Would you prefer the government hosting this data?
In the world I dream of, I could easily (and "easily" is the key word wrt the fact we're not there yet) host my own stuff and it would be visible to other people without a company or a government as intermediaries (except maybe for infrastructure, but that's something that can be solved, in the abstract, by mesh networks).
Of course we're not even close to having that, but the point is we should (IMHO) point our efforts in that direction. Is there money there? I don't know. Should I care there is no money there? I'm not sure.
The oft overlooked caveat to this line of thought is: we don’t have to like it.
You never know when companies like Alphabet or Facebook or Amazon or Apple will pull the rug out from beneath you and yank away that source of income, so don't stand on their rugs. If you let someone stand between you and your money, there will be someone standing between you and your money.
And as there is no way they could possibly review all uploaded videos with actual humans, much of this enforcement is done by machine detection and automated processing, and you will never get any explanation from a human, unless you are in the top 1000 accounts ranked by how much money they make for YouTube.
Not that this sort of content needs to be in video form, anyway. If I feel the need to learn about new, unregulated, or misregulated drugs, I'd prefer reading text, with as few still images as is possible to convey the needed information.
Pardon me, while I go watch "Peppa Pig Goes to the dentist crying Elsa". It's been on YT since Feb 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVx4hA0Tcdo
Aside the snark, its time to regulate how our data is used, what decisions are made upon it, and a proper grievance for companies that do that. The GDPR is a good start, to be honest.
Is the promotion of cats a political agenda? Can allcats.com take down videos of dogs?
Sure. Why shouldn't a private entity be able to determine what kind of speech they allow on their own property?
Even bazaars like 4chan are moderated.
Now, in order to speak, you nearly have to go through one of Their gateways. If you piss off FAMGA (Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon), you're gone off the net. Some of those gatekeepers are big scripts with no human intervention for your level. If you fall between the cracks, then you have no recourse, other than find a place like HN and beg publicly - lest you get shitcanned by the HN gatekeepers.
No, you're not. Not even close. The Daily Stormer is still online; you will be too.
Youtube is a private service, thus they can remove content as they wish. Of course, most forms of historical media have also removed or suppressed controversial content. But in the old days it was preemptive. There was only so much room in a newspaper, you had to own presses and a distribution network, and they didn't hire just any schmoe to write columns.
It was a proactive system of censorship. They got people invested in a career of finding the proper stories and promoting what was acceptable to the establishment. Obviously common people could say whatever they like in their daily lives, but their freedom to put content into a newspaper or television show for all to see was extremely limited.
We have enormous freedom in self-publishing mass media today. So much content is being created that no mortal person can serve as gatekeeper and pick and choose what gets published like a newspaper editor could. So on one hand, we're living in a utopia of free speech. But new ways are being devised to automatically manage content all the time. And even though human moderators don't catch everything, but they slowly do what they can.
There are some genuinely harmful ideas out there, of course. Some things that ought to be restricted. Who gets to decide? Is it right for a private company to choose? I doubt it, but private companies have always been choosing what gets into media. In the past their decisions were much more totalitarian than today.
Where does that leave Alex Jones, then? It's called a slippery slope for a reason.
You seem to be implying that Jones' videos are truthful/informative and totally-not-a-scam, while the videos in the article, which actually contained educational content, were false, misleading, and perpetuating a scam.
Meanwhile, Jones has a supplement business that pulled an estimated $15 mil over two years (some estimate $25 mil) [1]. Here is a sampling of reviews from an independent lab that tested the substances:
- "Both of these products are most likely safe, but ineffective."
- "This product is a waste of money. The claim that 'Anthroplex works synergistically with the powerful Super Male Vitality formula in order to help restore your masculine foundation and stimulate vitality with its own blend of unique ingredients' is fluff on multiple fronts."
- "This product's claims related to 'nascent oxygen' also have no real basis in science."
- "We tested this product on the chance that it might be potassium iodide or sodium iodide, which it wasn't. Survival Shield is just plain iodine."
etc.
This is a guy who "... repeatedly asserted the Sandy Hook shooting was staged and the parents were liars and frauds who helped in a cover-up" [2].
So, what's your definition of false and/or misleading?
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/we-sent-alex-jones-in...
[2] https://globalnews.ca/news/4149778/sandy-hook-sue-infowars-c...
EDIT: it seems I misread the intent of the post above mine. My apologies. I'll leave my response up for reference.
My point is to show that these criteria are very hard to apply consistently, particularly when there's money to be made. Alex Jones' channel is alive and well.
I can assure you wholeheartedly that I am implying that Alex Jones videos are squarely in the "false/misleading/perpetuating a scam" camp.
So why is youtube any different?
Youtube only differs from other websites in scale. They are moderating content as we see fit. We can disagree with their reasoning behind moderation. But it's silly to act like they didn't have this right all along
(And that's what I see in this comment section. Comments like "why should youtube say what I can and can't watch?" I'm pointing out that those arguments are a dead end.)
However if the title was "PHP is the best programming language in the world", then the account should be banned, and they should possibly forward the authorities the offenders IP Address so they can get the crazy person on a watch list.
There is always the old fashioned way of getting sponsors yourself and hosting the video on your site.
What I fail to see is what has his retort about free speech anything to do with my comment on the youtube monopolistic position.
And even if it was about RCs - talking about them and sharing experiences should be allowed, censorship of information only aids misuse.
But not sell them, which is what YouTubers do indirectly through affiliate links.
It's not the same as saying that an untested supplement will improve some aspect of your mind. Not analogous at all imho.
OH NO DID I JUST SAY NUCLEAR? banned.
Anyone know whether he disclosed that he was being compensated by the companies?
Beyond the anecdote I don't think this is censorship from Youtube, it's likely the creators were either venturing into advertising/selling products as the primary purpose of their videos, or giving some kind of medical advice about how they can improve your life/body, or both, both of which I think are against Youtube ToS. Given that it's a story from Motherboard we're probably just getting a partial part of the story and the article is just making it seem like Youtube is censoring something they shouldn't, rather than putting the creators at fault.
Vimeo? Twitch? Facebook? Metacafe or Dailymotion? There are also also already dozens of dapps for streaming like dtube, lbry, viewly, lino, flixxo....(etc, just see https://www.google.com/search?q=decentralized+youtube), but I don't see any particular venue rising above the rest, as a lot of creators seem to choose "all of the above" as an answer, syndicating content across as many domains as possible.
For instance Cody's Lab has a patreon page which doubtlessly helps with falling revenue from youtube, but it doesn't prevent youtube from giving him various community guideline strikes and locking his channel for videos that were considered acceptable years ago when they were uploaded but are now retroactively in violation.
(Some specific 'genres' of content creators have alternative platforms. For instance gamers have twitch, and gun channels have full30. But I've not seen any alternative platform becoming popular that targets the full range of youtube content)
(Incidentally the ubiquity of patreon makes me wonder if it too will shape up to be considered a harmful monopoly one day in the not so distant future.)
When Google bought out YouTube, as those that were online back then can attest, there were dozens of not hundreds of competing sites. None of those could hold a candle to the resources Google’s cash could buy, and they quickly dropped out of the running. The only site still around is probably vimeo, and only because they were smart enough to not target the masses and instead pick a niche to serve.
Take YouTube, a large commercial interest.
Add their lobbying, that is participating and influencing a limited, largely invitation-only discussion of what video distribution is and will be on the Web.
(I say largely invitation-only, because 10's and 100's of thousands of us can mount campaigns "of the masses" without moving the needle, or generating only a temporary reaction until the powers that be can slip their changes through another avenue or after simply wearing us out.)
Now, they are no longer "just" a commercial provider, free to choose what they wish to host.
They are defining the very nature of Web video (and, more broadly, content) distribution -- to suit their own purposes.
THAT's why you worry when big players start doing stuff. Because it tends to become "the law".
9/10 pieces of advice I see on Nootropic use amount to dangerous and misinformed medical advice.
I can understand why YouTube would want to avoid looking complicit in all of this, especially with more than one popular Nootropic supplement sending users to the hospital in recent months.
TL;DR It is suggested they improve cognitive function (memory, focus, etc.). They are not fully regulated and you can find examples for sale on Amazon. As such, no idea if short or long-term usage is safe but it's interesting product if you simply read what the labels claim.
YouTube essentially has a monopoly on video. Monopolies and other actors can be forced to comply with public space laws or to respect principles that normally apply only to the government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Just because someone can run a small-time operation out of their garage, doesn't mean another company doesn't have a monopoly.
But then again I'm old fashioned and like to read about stuff on some web site and then click to whatever video hosting site they use.
They bought into it. They are pretenders who, for the first time in recorded history, are able to perform a massive product recall in the name of censorship without incurring backlash on a scale that would cause bankruptcy or riots.
To wish away all that context in the name of "digital" is a fool's errand.
But they do pretend that, all the time. They are a common carrier when it suits them and a publisher with editorial control when it suits them. That’s not reasonable and they must be forced to choose one or the other.
As to who YouTube is to make that decision: they are the entity providing the resources.
TV stations decide what shows they want to air, and which ones they don't. And nobody calls it censorship. Youtube feels like public infrastructure. But legally, it's no different than a TV station deciding to cancel a show.
YouTube could keep all videos forever. There can be no commercial reason to 'cancel' a YouTube video. So we know that this decision is almost completely unrelated to the TV Station reasons.
2. They have a commercial reason to cancel these videos. Maybe they think the use of these drugs is risky, and gives their website an unsavory reputation. That hurts their brand (and potentially their bottom line). This is not unlike a TV show canceling a successful show when it's star actor becomes embroiled in controversy.
Number 2, agreed, we in fact know it can only be censorship (and not competing viewership) that drives the decision. That's my whole point.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/259477/hours-of-video-up...
As far as I can tell, YouTube video content is growing exponentially, and hard drive costs are dropping linearly.
Storage and network charges are already pennies per terabyte-day. So currently and in the forseeable future, YouTube's costs will probably be administrative.
And that's all beside the point. There's not hard 24-hour one-channel limit to what YouTube can 'broadcast'. So their model is completely unlike a traditional TV station. So that analogy is flawed. So we can conclude, YouTube's decision to show (or not show) anything is based on completely different criterion. Pedantry notwithstanding.
1a. Youtube has other expenses besides hard drives. Bandwith. Server infrastructure. Employee salaries. To name a few.
2. It's not censorship. It's editorial judgement. Are you saying websites should be forced to host opinions they don't agree with? There is no "fairness doctrine" for sites like youtube.
If we generate a serious following that is dependent on the platform we're giving up a tremendous degree of creative control and direction for our fans.
Not to mention the serious lock-down on live-streaming musical content, and copyright restrictions. If so much as five seconds of the wrong song is playing in the background, the whole episode gets pulled.
Can we do a cover of 'x'? Other people have, but will ours get pulled?
Here we have an instance where hundreds of other similar videos and channels exist, yet these three individuals were singled out.
If there was at least consistency in the censorship and copyright stuff, or a proper channel for communication, the platform would still be viable.
But, like the Apple iOS App Store, you can produce an entire project, upload it, and, if it even gets up there to start, you've basically just gotta cross your fingers and hope it stays there, because the right to pull it at any time is there.
tl;dr: at least if YouTube, Apple, etc, were consistent with censorship and offered proper channels of communication they would be much more viable platforms.
I wouldn't put covers in the videos at all. You're right, that's a legal minefield. Just use original music that you have the rights to.
Is it clearly stated that youtube can remove your videos just because? (considering, claiming it's not fitting guidelines is as vague as claiming it is bad for the environment)
...with artists suddenly withdrawing their music from streaming services...
...and Netflix constantly upping their price while enforcing ever more stringent HW-requirements for “good enough” DRM throughout your media rig for “premium” content...
...and YouTube happy to censor anything not approved by the Sanfran extreme left...
I have to say I really start appreciating having a personally curated, persistent library of media which is mine to own, and mine to decide where and how I use.
Everything old is new again, I guess.