The Linux Experiments YouTube channel has been terminated
twitter.com
twitter.com
Also, if you don't know the channel and want to check out his videos, you can still watch them on Odysee - https://odysee.com/@TheLinuxExperiment.
We should probably stop using this phrase as a feature
Instant thought was "ok so other than this channel it's all racism"
update: yeah, downvotes, whatever... "censorship" these days is often enough because people tell other people to use horse dewormer or drink bleach. It's not because they're having highly sophisticated discussions about global politics, but simply because they're actively harming people, spreading hate and whatnot. platforms should be able to decide whether they want to "poison" their living room by giving a platform to such content.
If you talk about international platforms, you should kinda think about that.
And I think it's fair that people in Germany are not allowed to deny that the Holocaust has happened. Call it whatever you like but remembering this monstrosity is the least thing we can do and far-right idiots don't need to have a platform for telling otherwise.
Which in my experience means they speak from a position of high privilege to not see the massive negative effects of the hate speech they strive to protect. Or that their purpose on this site is to spread division and hate.
It's sad that that was your instant thought. My experience so far with Odysee has been pretty good. It's no YouTube, but for the channels I follow, it's good enough. I hope it continues to to build momentum.
How much of the “over half” is the former and how much is the latter?
I think this just points out a fundamental misconception that censorship only applies to the ideas you oppose to and nothing else. I believe it's fully correct for the word 'censorship' to be used in this context.
"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."
"The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice."
Sounds familiar? It was written during WW2:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
"Proposed preface to Animal Farm, first published in the Times Literary Supplement on 15 September 1972 with an introduction by Sir Bernard Crick. Ian Angus found the original manuscript in 1972."
So, I don't think this was written during WWII.
If it wasn't, it was probably written very soon after the end. It uses "this war" to refer to WWII and it doesn't appear to discuss anything post-war.
The essay I linked to was written in 1945 - if you read it, it actually talks about the ongoing war etc, e.g.:
"... we are allies with the USSR in a war which I want to see won"
It wasn't published until 1972, for exactly the reasons Orwell outlines in it. Indeed, publishing Animal Farm itself was hard enough - many American and British publishers refused to do so, on the ground that the book clearly satirizes the USSR, which was then a war ally.
How adorable! You think "propaganda" is anything more than a post-hoc reactionary label often applied by those afraid of the outcome of widespread espousal of a controversial idea.
Yes, it exists. Yes, people are far more vulnerable to it than anyone thinks they are. Free Speech, however, is an ideal exactly in that we often in reality fail to attain it, but nevertheless should strive to.
Without the ability to articulate that which is ugly and repugnant to the common sensibility, one is divested of the capability of immunizing oneself from being led astray by someone already too far gone.
We should protect the ability to speak monstrous things that we are not intellectually blinded to their existence. For they will arise whether we talk about them in polite company or not.
But more and more the line is shifting, and we see censorship happening with far tamer content. Youtube specifically seems to crack down on security-related content for a while now. I've seen similar things happening over trivial content in the past. Things which nobody working in the business would consider as problematic, like how to setup VPN and firewalls. It's not really clear why this is happening. People at Youtube are claiming the content seems to be ok, but system says nope.
What past are you talking about? Censorship has been everywhere for most of human history.
>…the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Truth is not determined by a list of approved opinions, it can only be revealed by rigorously disproving everything that opposes it.
All these calls for censorship make me think we really are doomed to repeat history forever.
As someone who falls near the middle on most issues I probably detest a larger percentage of speakers than anyone who's solidly on the Left or the Right, but I have no issue understanding that my freedom depends on their freedom. If the people I despise are not free to speak then neither am I.
a) removed from everybody or
b) removed from nobody.
Freedom of movement: heading somewhere we don’t agree with, ok but you aren’t allowed to use public roads since we own those. Good luck getting to the voting station.
Freedom of assembly: we don’t support your protests cause, stay off public property, go hold your protest at your own house.
Freedom of conscience: fine think whatever you want but if you attempt to record it in any way we’ll block you.
A right without the means to act on it is nothing at all. You’re arguing for a society built like a prison. You should be ashamed.
Sometimes the flaw is with you & or your line of thought.
In this case, equating "not being allowed to post far-right propaganda on every concourse of communication" is not the same as being harassed at your own home because people are allowed to protest.
Without realistic alternatives it is spontaneous (even if erroneous) to think about the implication of private infrastructure over public rights. But the real matter is an issue of scale.
I am convinced that sooner or later governments will wake up and that the tech giants will be broken up or severely limited: the European GDPR and the Chinese crackdown on the sector are only the first signs.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/five-new-bills-a...
It stands to reason then that if all speech is truly free eventually some speech will be censored. America doesn't allow people to say "Fuck" on public TV broadcasts, therefore all speech isn't free. No one is harmed by a curse word. Worst case a child will learn the word a few years earlier than when they usually do, and yet we censor that anyway.
Therefore, you can't say that all speech is free speech on all channels.
What you say in person may at worst get you into an altercation or ostracized, but you have the right to say it. Once your voice is amplified out of earshot you are no longer truly free to speak as you will.
You can say what you want to say, yes, but the repercussions of your words amplify with every repetition. Not everyone is aware of that, and when you are on a platform where, by words, you can incite a group to violence safely from the other side of the country, you should have your speech monitored and censored if need be.
Why not back that up with some relevant quotes to support your thesis, friend? That seems a decent thing to do compared to the litany of homework you callously threw at me.
> So, I should read 25 books to verify that your one sentence claim is valid?
> Why not back that up with some relevant quotes to support your thesis, friend? That seems a decent thing to do compared to the litany of homework you callously threw at me.
Your snark isn't warranted. The Wiki article you yourself cited says where Popper introduced the concept and even speaks about what his limitations were.
I will let you read that again to find them, rather than providing a quote.
Honestly, given the comment being replied to started with "go and actually read" I think the snark is warranted if they want. Also, for what it's worth I think they were trying to modulate that snark a bit by using "friend".
If it's truly easy to realize what is being asked, a pointer in the right direction is useful. If it does require a lot of work, then providing some evidence to at least get someone started if not an actual reference would be called for.
In any case, I'm not sure a comment that boils down to "if you actually read X, you'd know that what you just said is wrong" is worth defending, regardless of whether you think it's factually correct or not. You could have just pointed out that there was evidence of this position and left it at that.
For what it's worth, I only bothered to reply because you're not the only person that took the comment that way. The strongest possible interpretation of the prior comment is "This isn't helpful to me. If you're going to state I'm wrong, please provide more information on how so I can address that usefully" which I think is a vary valid complaint to what it was responding to. Interpreting snark where it doesn't necessarily exist or providing additional snark in your own in response (not that you did this) isn't a useful way to move the discourse forward.
The internet sucks for nuance, but "friend" in this context doesn't read as modulation to me, it reads as sarcasm (and thus intensifies the snark).
Edit: Dropped a response that was due to a simple misreading. Sorry.
It does suck for nuance. The safest and most useful thing to do here (as a place that tries to keep things civil) is to assume it's not snark and treat it as sincere. If it was sincere, treating it as if it's not is causing more of a problem, and if it's not, treating it as if it is leads to useful responses.
> I don't think that's the case. There are a couple of other comments that read the GGP as unnecessarily snarky.
I think perhaps you misread me? I chose you as a representative comment to reply to because there were a few along similar lines. If it was just one, I probably wouldn't have bothered.
> The only thing I did that was unique was note that he didn't have to search through "25 books" to get the answer, because his own source gave it directly.
I'll just say that if that information was known to the original replier, it should have been included, and if it wasn't, perhaps the reply should have been reworded?
That you actually provided useful info is another reason I bothered to reply to yours. As one that actually provided value to the discussion, I hoped to steer any additional eyeballs responses might draw to a useful comment, rather than a useless one.
I don't want to clutter this discussion too much with meta forum etiquette stuff, which I'm already prone to do at times, so I'll try to refrain from any additional responses on this.
I did, sorry.
Maybe using the word "callous" made it seem that way, but that is an accurate depiction of what their response was, rough, without thoughtfulness, the reflexive expression of an above average mind unconcerned with how their message was received.
You would actually need to refute the argument directly for your assertion to have any weight to it.
- People make a big deal about renowned philosopher Karl Popper warning us of the danger and incoherence of tolerance towards free speech. I think this misuses his rep.
- The one-paragraph quote on the Wikipedia page linked above was Popper's full writing on this. You don't need to look further for it.
Others were already addressing the object-level arguments.
I don't need chapter and verse, just a homing beacon would suffice.
Besides, we're roughly adults here. Someone saying "Nuh-uh" to an oft-quoted article has the gravitas of damp toast. Why shouldn't I question their response?
Because you haven't read the source you're basing your claim on, you've only read about it from other people who haven't read it and are parroting it because it fits their agenda.
You do you, but that feels weird.
You followed that up with a command to read more of his work without narrowing down out from which of his 25 books would provide any context to back your assertion up.
I just want a little more context than a single sentence from some person on the internet to re-evaluate my hypothesis. That shouldn't be too much to ask. Especially since you're asserting that you know more about the subject than the people who authored the Wikipedia page and every person who has written an article about it.
What Popper didn't anticipate is that the square of public opinion would become the internet, and a big question this creates is if the internet is a place where rationale debate and proportional representation of ideas is possible or not.
If the internet were to make the public square of opinion a place of irrational debate, I think Popper would be very much against it, and would want us to do something about it.
Here's a quote from him:
> as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols
So the condition he puts forward is: can we counter the intolerants on the internet by using rational arguments? If we can, than suppression (he claims) would be unwise, but if we can't, than suppression by force (he claims) might be warranted.
At least that's how I interpret Popper.
Your freedom of speech does not extend to inciting a riot.
There are obvious limits to “free speech”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
No, it didn't go to the Supreme Court.
> "the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" has become synonymous with speech that, because of its danger of provoking violence, is not protected by the First Amendment."
While the phrase may be used that way, its referencing nonbinding dicta (expressions in a ruling that are not germane to the decision rule for the case actually before the court) that does not reflect preexisting law from a case that has since been almost entirely overruled and is widely recognized as being an aberration that (in its actual binding holding) allowed extensive government regulation of core protected political speech.
It reflects neither the law before the decision, the binding case law created by the decision, nor the state of the law after the decision was rejected.
Or put some other way, how do you reconcile that your freedom can be affected by someone's else's freedom? Like what if I use my freedom to turn others against you and have them hate you and berate you and bully you and ridicule you and refute you, and potentially have them vote for laws that take actions against you, or possibly have them commit hateful acts towards you, etc.
I would be very against government censorship or interventions against constitutional rights of free speech and right to assemble and protest, and right to vote.
Maybe I just don't have the data you have, but right now I'm not too sure I follow you.
Stupid hateful people might get trapped by anti-hate-speech laws, but the smarter ones, precisely the ones you need to be careful about, are fairly good at avoiding them and may even use the threat of prosecution to raise sympathy from the part of population that dislikes the incumbent government.
Most European countries have vibrant extremist movements (left, right, Islamic) even though their freedom of speech is much more limited than the U.S. standard.
I think most people (including myself) don't know why some harbor hateful resentment and intolerant ideals. And it isn't clear how to deal with it. It's very possible that we need to resist the temptation to try and simply brush those people aside. But I think one thing that isn't clear is if one of the cause for this increase is related to the internet providing bigger megaphones to those smart ones who like to recruit members to their ranks.
And part of that for me is how recommendation algorithms on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube operate, it seems to be tuned towards sensationalized and hateful content. So it does give you the impression that those platforms are failing to educate people with values of tolerance, liberalism, freedom, and individual rights which the USA is founded on.
It's a great question though, you probably don't fight intolerance with intolerance, but at the same time, you might need to be ready to fight it if it comes to that. But how do you avoid having it reach this point?
I'm not sure this is the same as letting one freely voice their hate of another and propagate lies and falsehoods about them.
I guess you see it as let's just all use propaganda and defamation against each other, and hopefully that evens out where we all meet in the middle through constant bi-directional propaganda and hatred.
But I see it more as let's not allow the use of propaganda and hate anymore, because those things are at the detriment of other people's freedom, and you should only be free to do what doesn't take away freedoms from others as well, unless it has been agreed between both parties through a contract and a system of laws.
I don't really have a proof that one would have better outcomes over the other, but personally I find having a civil debate in good faith with rational arguments is more pleasant than to have a demagogue debate in bad faith using appeal to prejudice, emotions, desires, falsehoods and defamation. So I'd rather we as a society needed to engage respectfully, rationally and in good faith, and I wouldn't mind this to be enforced both culturally and by law.
I've heard the "slippery slope" and the "what if that just radicalizes demagogues even more" arguments, and the latter one I find more possibly valid. I feel the slope isn't that slippery personally, like the slope would only slip if the person in power was again a demagogue ruling in bad faith, and at that point it be too late anyways, since they'd already be in power.
Now the argument that it could radicalize demagogues further, by giving them more ammo to justify themselves, I think that's a more plausible prediction. I'm not too sure about this bit yet, so I could be convinced here, but I'd need to also be convinced that letting demagogues continue to have large public reach isn't itself a bigger threat.
For example, the United States has no hate speech laws. In 2017 there were 2,024 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States. Germany has very strong hate speech laws, both applying to private citizens and obligating online networks to censor them. In 2020 there were 2,032 anti-Semitic hate crimes in Germany. Despite restrictions on hate speech, Germany has four times the per-capita anti-Jewish hate crimes as the US, a country with no hate speech laws.
How about the UK? They have strong hate speech laws. You can get arrested there for teaching a dog the Nazi salute. In 2018 there were 1,201 Islamophobic attacks in the UK. Despite having a rabidly Islamophobic president at the time, the US only had 223. That's over twenty-six times the per-capita Islamophobic hate crime rate.
Citations:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/816732/number-of-anti-se...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/germanys-laws-ant...
https://thehill.com/regulation/international/499762-anti-sem...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/20/record-numbe...
Postmodernism, the first time around, was the comedy.
Is it appropriate to force people to adhere to your strictures if they won’t do so voluntarily?
No, what I'm really asking is, "What happens if innocent people start being hurt by the lie?"
What happens if you are seriously injured in an accident but cannot get medical help because the intensive care facilities are full of people who disagree with the truth? Thoughts and prayers?
Does freedom come with any responsibility?
That would suggest we might benefit from a better mechanism for establishing the truth.
The best mechanism we’ve come up with so far is open and vibrant debate.
Do you have a better suggestion?
> What happens if you are seriously injured in an accident but cannot get medical help because the intensive care facilities are full of people who disagree with the truth?
The Rolling Stone story positing the above turned out to be entirely fabricated.
How would you propose we stem misinformation like that Rolling Stone article?
> Thoughts and prayers?
Open and vibrant debate.
> Does freedom come with any responsibility?
Sure it does, though assessing culpability is often a nightmarish impossibility, especially a priori.
Should we establish prior restraints on individual’s freedoms to enforce correct speech and beliefs?
If not, then what exactly are you proposing?
"Do you have a better suggestion?"
I do not. But open and vibrant debate only works when people are capable of determining when the debate has been settled, at least for the moment. And are willing to accept the settled decision.
Have you ever had a serious chat with a creationist? Of course, there is no positive evidence that can disprove the young earth theory, any more than you can disprove solipsism. The creationist argument ultimately fails because of the implications of its own flexibility. I've known people who claim that the faster they drive, the better they drive. Or that they are perfectly safe to drive stoned or drunk. fortunately, in those cases culpability is, as you point out, is easy.
Anti-intellectualism comes in many varieties. Someone can be so skeptical that they do not accept any argument because, say, Big Media and The Man are out to oppress them...somehow. Someone else can be so un-skeptical as to believe the first comforting story that comes along in spite of any facts suggesting that reality is harsher.
Open and vibrant debate is the only way to establish the truth, but truth is not established by popularity, nor by who yells the loudest.
"The Rolling Stone story positing the above turned out to be entirely fabricated.
"How would you propose we stem misinformation like that Rolling Stone article?"
I have no idea what Rolling Stone article you are talking about. Is it one of these:
https://www.kwch.com/2021/08/25/family-mcpherson-man-dies-wa...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/oregon-covid-19-patient-unable-icu...
https://abc13.com/us-army-veteran-daniel-wilkinson-michelle-...
"Open and vibrant debate."
Not really an answer to my question, but I'm sure it's very comforting to intensive care patients spending hours to days on gurneys in hospital hallways.
https://www.wtvy.com/2021/08/18/alabamas-hospital-crisis-int...
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/medical/patients-being-tran...
Freedom is easy if it doesn't come with responsibility, precisely because culpability is often a nightmare to identify. How many people are you willing to injure or kill in the name of freedom?
Should we just get used to the fact that there are no limits on lies and an idea just dreamed up by some rando on the internet is just as true as something from a so-called expert?
If not, then what exactly are you proposing?
Isn't the root problem here is the near monopoly held by god-tier corporations? Shouldn't FB/Goog have the right to moderate their content as they see fit? Shouldn't their network effect de facto monopolies be regulated so that there is room for other voices?
An illusion of truth can be created by repeatedly stating falsehoods by agents with an agenda to push. The question isn't about censorship, but rather how we can make our liberal democratic societies resistant to this type of manipulation, which inevitably results in terminal decline.
You are not free to force me to listen to them.
As a side note its sort of interesting to me how your un-popular, perhaps controversial yet not particularly offensive opinion is going to be censored from this discussion in which people are opposing your perhaps reasonable association with the phrase 'resistant to censorship'. "how dare they voice a dissenting opinion!" they might tell themselves, as they press the little button that will make your words fade away.
Downvotes are kinda tedious but I understand the original idea behind them. Such is life :)
Can't reply to the entire wasps nest I kicked over but I've read, agreed, disagreed, learned. Decent result overall!
Normally I wouldn't consider downvotes to be worth mentioning, but I thought the irony here was special and worth observing :D
so, thanks!
> We should probably stop using this phrase as a feature
> Instant thought was "ok so other than this channel it's all racism"
If you want to be in a place where only approved thoughts are allowed, there's plenty of places in the world and on the net that would accommodate you right now.
No need to turn every place into an arm of Mini-truth.
And
"I don't want to need down load a ledger which might contain even encrypted versions of that"
By the standards of "alternative" video sites there's a pretty diverse set of content including mirrors from some well known YouTube creators (KhanAcademy, EEVBlog, GreatScott, Veritasium, HarwareUnboxed, Not Just Bikes, EposVox) who don't produce heavily political content (whereas many other alt tech video sites are just 99% political content going a single direction)
Given goals towards freedom of speech, some content won't align with you politically (and some might), but there's enough decent content that you can potentially use it as an alternative platform successfully.
I guess I would say I'm aiming towards examples that are big enough to be notable and not just directly focused on political analysis or similar or type channels.
A lot of what throws somewhat sane people (I would include myself in that but of course I'm biased) off of using the alternate video sites is the second you load up the home page of something like BitChute or rumble and see nearly an entire page full heavily one-sided political content and many (justifiably) believe there's no content for them if they don't align there.
Odysee could use some more quality content for sure, but they at least operate in such a way that I'm not convinced they're only for one type of content and some of the creators I watch in Linux/technology space have somewhat of a presence there.
Can you link a video where politics comes in at all, let alone something that's very political? https://www.youtube.com/c/veritasium/videos
Maybe the driverless car one can be seen as somewhat political (by advocating for use of self-driving cars), but it's not necessarily a polarizing issue split along US political party lines, at the moment.
Or do you mean the host of the channel is very political, whether or not any of that is indicated in any of the videos?
Is Success Luck or Hard Work? (https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I)
I don't know about any other video that has any politics in them.
I would hope people try to asses it on the merits of the arguments and examples, and not how they perceive it related to a specific political agenda they are for or against.
But this is political in current situation, which I don't like.
I find high curation is the only way I find a service like YouTube to be usable.
There's an endless sea of content on there. It's not important that I agree with it or not, it's important if it's quality, which the overwhelming majority of it isn't.
I'm looking at the landing page of odysee now.
* Why can't Wolverine shack up with doctor strange?
* 1 minute of Luigi in a bag!!!
* Top sleep hacks
* Guess how old this Korean actress is?
I can't block these channels or show disinterest even though I made an account.
My issue isn't the politicalness, it's quality and relevance.
I think your examples are a valid criticism, it's just that many of the alternatives are far worse (depending on your standpoint)
FWIW I would suggest looking at the home page of YouTube in incognito mode, most of the videos don't meet my quality standards either.
* TikToks that will get you in trouble
* Medical Emergencies: When Acts Go Horribly WRONG!
* Family Guy roasting every country
>I can't block these channels or show disinterest even though I made an account.
Yeah I think appropriate filtering options are vital for less curated platforms to be more usable. That's not an impossible problem to solve, but I would have expected better options by now.
>My issue isn't the politicalness, it's quality and relevance.
I think it's mainly a chicken and egg problem, there's not as much quality content as I'd prefer so there's less relevant quality content.
My biggest hope is that a certain threshold can be met where more quality content will be added and people aren't scared by the preexisting lower quality content that they don't want to be associated with.
There's definitely a need for there to be some competition to YouTube (Google et al.), but it's a pretty large hill to overcome to get there.
Of course YouTube still has a very strong hand in regards to monetization.
For worthwhile content I hold more hope for rokfin - www.rokfin.com/discover
Like, if the worst thing you can say about it is that a guy that refuses to say “damn” or “shit” or “fuck,” is morally offended by some of the legal content, I’m not sure that will matter to people who are looking for a platform that won’t kick people off the platform for arbitrary reasons.
But that's not what I described. Its not the content Lunduke had an issue with, it was the marketting decision to promote it with an exclusive spotlight, and then the following unprofessional communications revealing something really dodgy about the company. Conversations about it on reddit have been removed apparently. I found Lunduke has posted an account of it on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBZjUPavvs8
I'm plenty fine with content I'm not a fan of being on a platform, but it's pretty abhorrent to be promoting it from official channels.
What he's referencing, not work appropriate: https://odysee.com/@Odysee:8/axxl-on-odysee:c
Their marketing strategy seems to miss the mark and if the company can't understand that it's a huge mistake which will probably not get better.
I just watched his video and then I had to go back and look at the video Odysee promoted. Is it content I like? No. I don’t find a guy in a mask yelling funny or even entertaining. The whole thing feels very juvenile in a 2003 internet kind of way. Looking at the Odysee social media accounts, I don’t like or agree with a lot of their content or politics. For the record, I don’t like Lunduke's content either.
That said, I find his outrage curious and poorly argued. Lunduke can choose to host his videos wherever he wants and can have whatever opinion he wants to have about a platform. But throwing a temper tantrum because a service he shilled for happens to promote content he doesn’t like and then the people in charge of the company won’t kowtow to his demands still strikes me as both a) hypocritical and b) a position most people who are seeking a platform that is anti-censorship won't find compelling. If you believe Odysee is shady (and I personally think most businesses with no direct revenue path other and reliant on buzzword bingo like blockchain and decentralization are inherently sketchy) now because it promotes a guy who screams about ass fucking, but you didn’t think they were shady when they were promoting your anti-vax/anti-mask rhetoric or paying you to write spon-con, I’m going to roll my eyes and discount everything you say.
I for one am not looking forward to this. Youtube is no longer an acceptable platform for distributing your videos. If a person who makes good videos is forced out of youtube, that can only be a good thing. Hopefully their videos will help make another service more popular.
Youtube terms of service are public and unacceptable. People who get burned by them had it coming.
Still wild guesses, but I'd be worried about mid-sized channels with a lot of ambivalent viewers, not really invested, not going to swap platforms. Although how all that factors in to various monetisation strategies is complex.
Anyway, the situation is really interesting. I don't think YouTube can pull off the censorship campaign that they are trying for. They're fighting some really fundamental economic forces - it is too cheap to get people a message if they want to hear it.
Thing is none of them will make you YouTube money, so smaller creators don't bother, while larger ones usually just cross-post stuff, leaving no incentive for their audience to bother with the alternative.
Maybe I'm thinking too easy, but what about self-hosting. Some "all inclusive" hosting with Hugo or whatever static page builder you like.
That should be enough to get your content out to the masses.
Throw in Disqus if you really need to, set up an RSS feed and a newsletter and let's go.
That sounds like an unregulated place for all the people who were thrown out by those with at least some ethics left.
These networks, no matter how they work under the hood, are obviously the problem, as they are single points of failure.
Run your own stuff. Most channels will not have enough visitors/viewers to kill a shared webhosting package, so there's no big deal in doing this on your own.
You don't have to federate. As host, you can host whatever you want (you are of course subject to laws in the country you're hosting in) and censor whatever you want on your server. You can basically do anything you want.
If you host adult content like pornography it is very likely the larger federation will not federate with your server, and for adult content that isn't pornographic in nature it is probably best to require content warnings.
Now get back to us in 5 years, when you'll have managed to build a comparable audience just by using SEO.
> If every video creator hosts their work on a different platform, I no longer have a one stop shop for video consumption.
Yes you can, use an RSS reader and subscribe via RSS. This problem was solved before tube sites were even widespread, and then the UX for subscriptions devolved, primarily because these sites want to lock you in and make you feel how you do. But you can still curate your own feed and have all your video content in one feed, I do it, you just have to use RSS.
YouTube and Bitchute both support RSS, also Peertube has RSS built in if you watch anything self hosted using that software, as far as all the other tube sites out there I'm not sure because I don't subscribe to anyone on those sites, but I would expect that they do more than likely as RSS is still a web standard.
All but Peertube I've found sort of hide syndication in some way to encourage their account based subscription because they'd rather you use that. It might take a minute when you want to subscribe on a new site you don't usually use to figure out their feed URL format.
It can be a little clunky to add subscriptions I guess, but how often are you doing that? What matters more is integrating all your subscriptions into one feed, you're watching every day multiple times a day, you're not subscribing every day.
And you're saying that as a techie. How do you think the average subscriber of Markiplier, Pewdiepie or Logan Paul would feel about that? Things like peertube will always be a super small niche because there are two dozen alternatives to YouTube and they all suck if you depend on YouTube for income. As long as those oopsies don't happen to the big YouTubers on a regular basis, the status quo will remain.
Plus, as much as people complain about YouTube recommendations, I found a couple small but interesting channels already. Imagine everything were distributed across ten different platforms.
I don't care about them. People can do what they want. I'm not trying to revolutionize the world. I'm just trying to live life the way I want to and help people who are interested in doing things that I do.
It doesn't require you to be a techie to copy paste a URL. It's as easy as adding a contact on your phone.
I watched an interview with Jaron Lanier yesterday actually talk about YouTube recommendations, he talks about an experiment, click the top recommendation and let it play 10 times and see what you get. You have to keep in mind just because they've been helpful a few times doesn't mean they're more helpful than no curation at all. Confirmation bias exists. Remember YouTube before Google owned it? Most of the content was not as good as it is now but it was still much easier to find new interesting things. That algorithm is superior to anything that's been implemented since, and honestly every iteration makes it worse. The fundamental difference with it was that it recommended based on what other people watched, not based on some hand waving about getting to know you and your preferences.
If everything were distributed across ten platforms then viral spread of content could only occur organically. That would be amazing.
If you can subscribe to channels on YouTube and be satisfied with that content (and not from e.g. YouTube's recommendations for stuff you don't subscribe to), then you can do those same things whether the videos are hosted on YouTube or not, just like millions of people do with their podcast subscriptions that are never actually hosted "on" iTunes.
Use an app that can listen to podcasts? Uh... yeah.
> apart from the subscription feed, there's recommendations based on the videos you already watched
So you're just going to ignore the context and pretend that you're saying something insightful? The comment you're responding to specifically pointed out that the original commenter doesn't cite YouTube's recommendation engine as the source of value for him/her.
I can think of a simple engineering solution to the problem of recommendations, an open API standard to fetch them should a user want that functionality. So it could work, but the hosts don't want it to work.
But that aside, just because a service makes recommendations doesn't mean the recommendation engine is more useful than randomly finding things or getting sent things by friends. I'd argue that YouTube recommendations, at least in their current iteration, are less useful to users than their friend sending them a video they were subscribed to, following random twitter accounts that share content they enjoy, or even a chronological list of uploads sorted with content tags. You're placing a lot of value on something that frankly is a raging dumpster fire of hot garbage.
Audient aggregation matters because once on site, recommendations and discovery systems increase the likelihood of some other site content being viewed or accessed.
Advertiser appeal matters if advertising provides a significant portion of site revenues (and it virtually always does, for large-scale properties). Advertisers themselves seek audiences, with particular interest in both size and composition. As with audiences, there are cognitive and organisational costs to maintaining multiple relationships, so that advertising platforms tend to grow and monopolise over time. Small niche platforms are of very limited interest.
Both factors intersect with other elements, including site infrastructure development and maintenance, such that large sites have vastly superior economies of scale. This includes a lot of activities and benefits with low public visibility including moderation, abuse, legal, and general business overhead effects.
The overall result is a pronounced tendency to create large and durable media monopolies. New technologies may disrupt earlier established entities for a time. But the old structures have an exceedingly high likelihood of re-emerging. More pointedly, technologies of greater efficiency only amplify the tendency to form, and the size of, such monopolies.
That train of thought applied across the web would end up a clusterfuck. Who decides what and why?
Authors can already post whatever links in the description, why do you want to force someone to do something?
Presumably, it's better financially for big channels to keep users on YouTube.
Never heard of them, but that page looks great! Bookmarked.
I hope it can achieve a critical mass because it does look interesting, but I don't hear many people talking about it - even in tech circles.
It's not that there hasn't been a need for other stuff to be published - it's that there hasn't been a proportional need. Which is exactly what I meant: any alternatives to established platforms are going to have the preponderance of content banished from those established platforms, in direct proportion. So if the purges on e.g. YouTube mostly target right-wing extremism, but also target some other content, then that's the distribution you're going to see on alternative platforms. But what other choice do you have, if you're interested in that other content?
That's exactly what they did. Quite a lot of contents that was banned on YT moved over to PornHub; until the latter started removing them also.
This drive-by algorithm BS is ridiculous.
Or are they hidden away somewhere in the settings?
EDIT: I mailed to hello@lbry.com and asked them about this.
Contests and sweepstakes are carefully regulated in America, with slightly different regimes in all 50 states. You should not run one unless you have gotten legal help with it!
but no more detail than that I can see...
[1] https://odysee.com/@TheLinuxExperiment:e/win-the-tuxedo-aura...
I expect things like this to continue to grow as we rely more and more on algorithms in all walks of life without thinking through true recourse options.
An analogy would be like a TV host telling the audience to watch the show on five televisions so that they would get a higher Nielsen ratings and then get more money from advertisers. No TV network or advertiser would be happy about that.
In other words, if this is what was really happening, this channel was essentially trying to scam YouTube into thinking they were more popular than they really are for their own monetary gain.
To me it seems like this channel deserved what they got, if the allegations are true.
I even doubt that the channel was automatically removed by an algorithm. Maybe it was flagged by one for human review. Just because a company doesn’t contact you doesn’t mean a human wasn’t involved in your particular case. Furthermore, just because Sweetwater got away with it one time doesn’t mean it’s not against the TOS.
I’m just speculating, and I don’t have skin in the game.
Your concerns about "scamming" aren't relevant. Many of YouTube's most popular channels do this sort of contest, and there is no hard ban on this type of thing.
Was there a warning? Was there some communication with the owner saying "Hey, what you're doing violates or Ts&Cs"? It seems like if there was, the owner would be tweeting that he disagrees with the deletion rather that completely not understanding why it happened.
Putting more humans in the loop would be more expensive, but it would help end these puzzling situations where creators don't know why they've been told to stop creating.
I think it's worth noting that algorithms like these are deployed specifically to take employees out of the loop, and adding a communications step would almost certainly pull them back in.
Potentially, though another consideration the algorithm implementers have is to make it difficult to "game" them. If it provides feedback, you make it easier for someone to figure out what will slip through and subvert the it.
How can deleting the entire channel without warning possibly be the ethical move here?
Sweepstakes and giveaways aren't banned, they just have some overhead and legal requirements around them.
They don't and thus have no more legal authority to "know/id" illegality than they have to "know/id" legality.
One possible guess would be the account getting hacked, somehow moved to a different address, then deleted. (I have no idea how primary e-mail addresses work for Google/Gmail accounts, except that what used to be a standalone YouTube account got merged into a Google account which once I created a gmail address for it suddenly had a different primary e-mail address, so there are ways for stuff like this to change and "brand accounts" complicate it further on YouTube).
https://twitter.com/thelinuxEXP/status/1435311971973406726
I want to know what happened for Google to make such a serious mistake.
Can confirm it's back: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheLinuxExperiment
Seems glitchy though, I can't sort by "most popular", it suddenly says "this channel has no videos". Hopefully that's just an old cached result that will clear up at some point.
Remember, this is Google. They do everything automatically including messing up big time.
Needing a human in the loop to mess up big time wouldn't scale, at least not web scale.
The amount of propaganda on the platform is ridiculous, though very frequently disguised as "news" or "educational". As someone who's been around quite a bit, I can also imagine that it doesn't look like propaganda to average Americans (I'd be glad to be wrong on this).
A great deal of content is just plain sophistry too. Inspecting comments, it seems that most viewers don't pick up on this.
At the same time, finding reviews or alike for products or services is near impossible -- the platform is filled with generic reviews which are indistinguishable form ads.
There have been countless articles and posts written about this problem over the last several years.
I would challenge _you_ to go educate yourself on this rather than ask others to bring this widely available and widely accepted information to you.
Yes we had issues with HCQ in the beginning, but ivm is being actually studied right now by Oxford Uni/NHS in their big covid trials in the UK… it’s amazing what a hit job the media is doing on it.
For me, it's about preventing people that aren't medical professionals from self-medicating with a potentially harmful substance. Plus there's been some less than stellar suggestions of covid treatments in the past ranging from dubious to lethal. If it turns out to be safe, then doctors will no doubt prescribe it as necessary.
My point about “horse dewormer” is that some articles in the media list it as just that without mentioning at all that it is also human medication. Look at the recent articles about Joe Rogan, they couldn’t stop themselves.
Afaik the only difference between human and animal ivm are levels of impurity.
I bet you get mad at the news for reporting rain because water exists in other forms, and has other ways of moving about besides rain right?
Which brings up another point: some pharmacies are refusing to fill it, even when prescribed by a doctor. If you want to place the blame for people getting "horse dewormer", such pharmacies deserve part of the blame.
The complaint, stated by sprafa, is: "Look at the recent articles about Joe Rogan, they couldn’t stop themselves."
... to which you responded, ignoring the complaint and doubling down, right before kicking it up a notch with a personal attack/shameless attempt to strawman ("I bet you get mad at the news for[...] right?").
So did Rogan literally buy and eat something from a package that says "horse dewormer" or not?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-pl...
It's in significant use in humans.
It's not an anti-viral in any sense of the word.
I'm not recommending using drugs we don't understand or have a full picture of. I am recommending to stop calling it horse dewormer. At the very least call it an anti-parasitic in use in the 3rd and 2nd worlds.
I'm not a infectious diseases expert, but to my knowledge the viruses that it's been found to be effective against are all mosquito borne; it's just as likely related to it's toxic action on mosquitos in general. Still, it's all baseless conjecture on everyone's part. If someone cares to throw money at it, it's something that can be investigated.
At the end of the day just get the widely available vaccine and move on with life, like you would for other viruses that we've got vaccines for. I feel like we're all making this way harder than it has to be just so we can all continue to yell at each other.
The qualifier is not necessary. Truthfully, they should just call it ivermectin and describe what it actually is, how it has actually been used, and the current state of research showing that currently has little proof of effectiveness though there are trials ongoing.
The real question is about its anti-viral properties. We know they exist, but don't know why or to what extent. Further, we don't know if they extend to COVID and we don't now if the effective dosage is high enough to increase the rates of side effects (especially bad ones).
The result is extremists on both sides saying wild garbage. Either it's the salvation of mankind hidden from you by the grand conspiracy or it's toxic horse dewormer that will certainly kill anyone who even approaches it.
This is a real problem. If I were researching Ivermectin and COVID, I'd be scared that loonies from one side or the other might attempt to hurt me or ruin my life over their delusions.
This is because yesterday I looked at videos of Alex the African grey parrot.
As far as I can tell, there are no ad agencies or think tanks involved here, except I guess that Atlantic Records made Ed Sheeran more popular than he was already by promoting him. I think this is pretty much purely "videos that people are gonna click on".
The propaganda is in what's missing.
I do, always, see three or four covid-19 videos when I go to the main YT page. Whatever you think about their message, they look like propaganda to me.
It looks like propaganda to us too.
We're not quite as dumb as the rest of the world thinks. That said, I suppose everyone's a bit dumber than they think they are, so take my statement with a grain of salt.
YouTube delivers content based on what you've watched.
I watched something right wing, I can't remember what, and for years YouTube was bombarding me with crazy half-truths and memes. I tuned them out just like most of the other bullshit I get bombarded with all day, but I wonder how many people have been radicalized this way..
Kinda silly, but it does make me chuckle that people like Ben Shapiro, PragerU, and 4Patriots are subsidizing my lefty youtube subscriptions.
1) The utter lack of support from monied interests.
2) The fact that leftists love nothing more than fighting slightly different types of other leftists.
3) the radical left is a bogeyman and the reason you don't see many of them is that they're exceptionally rare.
4) radical leftists have better opsec after generations of actual persecution and censorship, and don't do youtube
5) I think tiktok is more popular with the left?
So it's not that radical left doesn't exist, it's just that they drop their guns and what's left it's not that loud.
> Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence an audience and further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented.[1]
PragerU's "About Us" Page:
> Prager University is the world's leading conservative nonprofit that is focused on changing minds through the creative use of digital media. Taking full advantage of today's technology and social media, we educate millions of Americans and young people about the values that make America great.[2]
I'd also encourage you to check out their "What is PragerU"[3] brochure (PDF) which goes into more detail.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
[2]https://www.prageru.com/about
[3]https://assets.ctfassets.net/qnesrjodfi80/UfBbMy7KkcxxjzVTlR...
They created a fresh account using a fresh browser, clicked the top result for “PCR test reliable”, then some recommended videos. Just three clicks in they get to 9/11 and qanon conspiracy videos. By then their home feed too is full of that stuff.
I certainly don't see that on the youtube channels I frequent, but admit that the 'news' is typically op-ed disguised as news.
An alternative theory is that they (youtube) pushes 'news' since it pays well and is quite popular. 'News' tends to come from official channels over time with a kind of network effect. Those channels are all Pravda. The fact that it's propaganda is not necessarily a youtube choice but a major news organization choice.
1. constantly reeling from one public backlash after the other
2. advertising dropping you due to controversial content
3. government coming after you for controversial content
If I were a business, I'd go content moderation all the way. Less blow black and more steady income.
If complete neutrality was an answer these companies would be doing that, since it's the cheapest option.
I’m not sure advertisers care about this as much as people claim. YouTube’s censorship really ramped up in 2017 after Trump was elected, and was fairly limited before then. I don’t think they had trouble with advertisers before then all those years. I could be wrong - have any sources that could help?
Once the size is there, you curate. Profit becomes the issue and the tendency is to simply become cable TV with thousands of channels.
I wonder how you could architect video access for content that gets peoples' knickers in a twist but is still legal. There's loads of single points of failures still. TV settop box access, smart TV/Roku access, the difficulties and expense in storing and serving up video, etc.
One is harmless the other involves lifelong trauma.
All of that can end up being very harmful to one's mental health. And that's not even accounting for the people who try to physically go after those children after seeing them and convincing themselves that they "love" the child.
Calling this harmless is absolutely disgusting.
The wording in the email from Google suggests they don't yet have enough info to trust the inquisiting email comes from the channel owner (source: my own experience proving email account A and email account B were the same person).
No, there is a middle ground that Google, with its army of engineers, could implement in a weekend:
1. You stop trying to assume you know what advertisers want their ads to be displayed on.
2. You implement a basic, fixed (but can be expanded) ACL-type system based on categories such as "hacking content", "politically sketchy content", "sexual content", etc.
3. YOU LET THE GOD DAMN ADVERTISERS DECIDE FOR THEIR OWN GOD DAMNED SELVES WHAT KIND OF CONTENT THEY'RE OK WITH ADVERTISING ON.
4. You end up spending LESS on content moderator salaries, and end up with FEWER unhappy advertisers because THEY can align their principles with the content. Hak5/Sparkfun would be fine advertising on Linux Experiments. I'm sure MyPillow would be happy to advertise on a Q Conspiracy channel. The demand for this feature is unquestionably there.
5. You stop playing God and pretending that the concept of global "community standards" means anything at all in a world with 7 billion people and hundreds of thousands of disparate interests-based communities, each with their own disparate community standards.
"Company X advertises on a website showing jailbait sexual content" or "Company X advertising on a site promoting Q Conspiracy".
You are going to fight an uphill battle explaining to people the naunces of the system, which is a losing battle.
Yes there are still jailbait videos on YouTube, but Google is already heavily moderating and deleting videos. The more "extreme" ones are already being deleted and moderated, what is left is probably more of the tamer ones. The amount of jailbait videos or hate videos or whatever you see now is probably 1/10 or less of what would be there if it was a free for all.
What is being proposed is no moderation of content. The advertisers can choose what to show ads on, but that's it. In that case there would be a flood of these contents. Then its easier to attack them.
Who or what ensures that the Q conspiracy channel is properly categorized as "politically sketchy content" and not "hacking content"?
The reality is no amount of computer code will fix a human problem.
The problem: for some of these, the definitions, the legality status and the liabilities (especially around "politically sketchy" stuff) may differ wildly between jurisdictions. And you will always have trolls mis-labeling their content on purpose, or content that is to be classified as "gambling" in the US but not in Germany... the list of issues is endless.
> 3. YOU LET THE GOD DAMN ADVERTISERS DECIDE FOR THEIR OWN GOD DAMNED SELVES WHAT KIND OF CONTENT THEY'RE OK WITH ADVERTISING ON.
And then they will still have headlines "Youtube allowing Nazis, antivaxxers, incels and other threats to the general public". Not to mention the legal issues (e.g. Nazi content is banned in Germany/Austria, LGBT content in Russia, a whole boatload of stuff illegal in India with jail threats for local staff)...
> 5. You stop playing God and pretending that the concept of global "community standards" means anything at all in a world with 7 billion people and hundreds of thousands of disparate interests-based communities, each with their own disparate community standards.
You will always need some sort of "global minimum standards" that ideally is at least somewhat of a common ground in Western-allied nations. And that means: no Nazis/white supremacists, no Qanon, no antivaxxers, no incels, no adult content/gore, no drugs (tobacco/alcohol/illegalized drugs), no gambling, no glorification of violence.
Simple: Western nations are a somewhat coherent cultural sphere.
Adding in India (with its current war against Twitter and anything that dares criticize Modi), the Arabian and other dominant-Muslim countries (women's rights, LGBT, democracy) or Russia/China (which are essentially dictatorships) into consideration would add way too much illiberality to be acceptable.
Have you talked with advertisers? They're really twitchy about this stuff, they even have vendors for brand safety they'll want to include in their ads or have you integrate with if you're a platform like YouTube to rule out ads on anything that could show their brand in a bad light.
I don't use YouTube, but I thought this was what the demonetisation was - the creators were getting a trickle of revenue, but most of it was gone, sounds to me like the impacts of it being considered not "brand safe" and most advertises enable such controls reflexively.
I think you're confusing the Internet with YouTube. The Internet has no global content standard, but this is not the world that YouTube lives in. It lives in the world of ad-supported services which has been repeatedly very clear about its minimum expectations regarding community standards. See: https://www.google.com/search?q=adpocalypse
“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” —H. L. Mencken
Yeah, they're being shitty piggies, but we have tech we can use too.
Worse, growthism forced its "Organize the world's information" mission into "Swallow and monetize the world's information" with an added helping of "know exactly what every person wants, even if they don't know they want it yet."
any day now, the moral, upstanding, self-restrained capitalists will buck the profit motive and save us from the unsavory sorts who rule our world today.
Unfortunately the average senator is over 60 and the companies that own these platforms have deep pockets.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
Is there by any chance a mirror of its content anywhere to download?
If I were a YouTuber I would maintain an archive of my old videos available on ThePirateBay.
Any kind of YT competition needs to figure out on how to keep the revenue streams intact.
Also, ThePirateBay does not compete with YouTube even in the cases of the same content being available on both the platforms. Most of the people want to watch the videos on-line, go to YouTube naturally and won't bother using torrents. Sophisticated people who want an off-line copy just use youtube-dl anyway. The actual YouTube audience will only go to ThePirateBay when they really can't access the videos on YouTube.
His content can be seen on Odysee[0].
Chris Titus Tech has a video covering this[1].
Honestly, I try to watch everything on Odysee these days, anyway, just to try to continue de-Googling my life.
I think it is not difficult to consider any contributor in a (virtual) Commons to be subject not only to obligations but also to a set of rights.
Its a must have channel next to Destination Linux Network suite of channels.
Hope it gets reversed.
You can criticise, protest, appeal, scream or throw a tantrum about it, etc but you should finally see that this can happen to anyone sitting on private platforms like YouTube.
YouTube will never change and it will only get worse.
> the right to terminate and de-platform anyone's account who has been in violation of YouTube's guidelines and terms of service.
The problem here is letting automated systems, with a history of producing false-positives for content that didn't violate the Guidelines or ToS, having final say on account termination, with no concrete way to appeal - To me this is a fair criticism.
If the original comment says "the right to arbitrarily terminate and de-platform anyone's account", then I'll say that you have a point.
It's kinda funny, because it's effectively saying that they want to nationalize tech companies for being successful.
This seldom aligns with the public's interest. For many (most?) companies, only the rich have any voting power, whereas the majority of the population just has to follow along.
Publicly traded companies are like a democracy where you get more votes the more money you have. The implication here is that your voice/needs are only important if you're rich, and are unimportant if you're average or poor (which kind of explains why the US is the way it is).
But, the actual incentive structure of "who controls the corporation?" is not shareholders, whose ownership is a) so diffuse as to be unknowable, sans documentation from a stock exchange b) very often held by proxies, with voting rights exercised by those proxies as well [1], c) nearly impossible to coordinate, even when the majority of shares in in private hands, and d) frequently bought back and owned by management itself. Looking at this structure, one can say that the actual control of the corporation is held a) by the people that manage it, b) by the people that capitalize it (not the same thing as stockholdership) and c) by the people that regulate it. c) is very clearly the government. You could make a very good case that b) is indirectly the government as well, since it comes from banking institutions who receive money to lend from the federal government, or rather, the ability to create debt.
My point is that, given the diffusion and non-coordination of ownership of a publicly traded company, combined with the effect of regulation, (and if you know anything about regulatory capture), the coordination of regulation with the large interests being regulated, public corporations may be treated, quite reasonably as public.
[1] Something to the tune of a fifth of all shares of Fortune 500 companies are held by Blackrock, Fidelity and Vanguard, as a part of how they issue index funds. These financial institutions are the ones who execute the voting rights on those shares, not the people who bought the index funds. See: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/the-new-power-bro...
It's not saying that at all (nationalising companies is a very specific action that doesn't have anything to do with what you described).
That said, I don't agree with your premise which appears to be that this is bad. Converting something that is basically a utility already (i.e. everyone uses it and everyone expects to be able to. It's almost unthinkable to have daily life without it) to a nationalised company would be a good thing.
The US has basically been a communist country since the 70s when it passed the ADA requiring businesses not only to serve the disabled but spend money to make sure disabled people can access their services.
There’s basically no difference between the US and the USSR ever since.
https://blog.scorchedweb.com/technology/supreme-court-on-con...
Was that because they got big, or was it because they were granted a government monopoly?
The first one. Natural monopolies exist. This libertarian talking point of "there wouldn't be monopolies without government intervention" is lunacy.
Can you provide the legislative history that supports this? According to wikipedia airlines, cell phone companies, cruise ships, and shipping companies operate as common carriers, even though none of them are controlled by monopolies.
> Natural monopolies exist. This libertarian talking point of "there wouldn't be monopolies without government intervention" is lunacy.
I'm not a libertarian, but I can still see the difference between "it would be really expensive to lay another set of phone lines" and "the state forbids you from laying another set of phone lines".
No, I'm not a lawyer/historian.
> According to wikipedia airlines, cell phone companies, cruise ships, and shipping companies operate as common carriers, even though none of them are controlled by monopolies.
Airlines, cruise ships, and shipping companies, do not own the 'land' (in the georgist sense) that they traverse, so they're just completely irrelevant to the discussion.
As for cell phone companies, you may remember that a certain company known as AT&T was famously broken up into dozens of smaller companies (that have since re-congealed). Also those companies are legally required to interoperate with each other, ie: your T-Mobile phone will "roam" on AT&T's network.
> I'm not a libertarian, but I can still see the difference between "it would be really expensive to lay another set of phone lines" and "the state forbids you from laying another set of phone lines".
As far as I'm aware, the state, does not forbid anyone from laying another set of phone lines or railroad lines or roads, for the same reason that it doesn't forbid anyone from violating conservation of energy.
Got big.
But why would it matter? Govs suck at accountability, I wouldn’t expect that to factor in now.
However, I also don't count any current social media entity as a monopoly.
Oh very much it is. Come to the lovely Eastern Europe and see for yourself how good national owned companies are. Full of useless bureaucrats put there to ensure voters so the ruling party can continue ruling. Also in huge debts which are paid by more taxes so the working people pay for the lazy.
Unless the human race somehow chains itself to selflessness, nationalization + democracy is a sure way to destroy any organization. Now privately owned is not much better but in theory can be replaced with a competitor. Not so much for a national organization.
Source: Living and suffering daily in Eastern Europe.
Privatisation of the British railways was a disaster, and the creeping privatisation of the National Health Service is a disaster in the making as well. As far as I'm concerned, when we're talking about well-understood, national-scale services, private sector almost always starves the service out of greed or is outright incompetent.
In any case, I've never received anything other than json, xml and csv. Jag är inte svenska, though.
I am part of that group. I am willing to accept a free-for-all till a company reaches a certain size as far as its user-or-customer base is concerned: something between the population of New Zealand and that of Australia. Beyond that it should be answerable to the people.
I also think supranational corporations should either be banned or very tightly regulated.
Private entities can be swayed by their customer's demands. Not saying that YT _will_ be swayed, just that this sort of creator outrage has a place in the market system, and "throwing a tantrum" over their bad behavior doesn't always have to be met with "private entities can do whatever they want!"
I wish he were wrong, because he's saying sucks, but he's just telling the hard truth the way it is.
YouTube won't change, yet we continue using it as if it didn't have the track record it does.
No part of what you said is an argument.
Do private platforms have unlimited latitude? If not, what are the underlying philosophies underlying current limitations, and can those be seen to imply that other limitations should be made? Should private platforms have unlimited latitude?
Those are discussions that could be had. "Private things are allowed to do whatever they want" is not only a thought-terminating cliché that avoids all ethical or tactical judgement, but a simple falsehood.
Who is arguing that? No need to create a straw-man argument.
> "Private things are allowed to do whatever they want"
Who are you quoting here?
So YouTube (owned by Google) doesn't reserve the right to terminate and de-platform anyone's account who has been in violation of YouTube's guidelines and terms of service?
I already said the offended users can appeal, didn't I? I'm just saying that not only this can happen to anyone, but YouTube (Google Inc.) will not change and we'll see more of this regardless if it is automated or not.
> Who are you quoting here?
Nobody. But if the fact that Google reserves the right to ban people for reasons described in its ToS is an argument for something, I'd like to know what else it could be an argument for. Who cares what Google reserves?
edit: I'm being sloppy. "Google reserved the right to delete for this reason," and "private things that reserve rights get them", and "Google is private" equals "Google gains this right." This would be an argument you could make. However, you haven't made this argument.
Are you making an argument about choosing youtube? I might be mistaking a pragmatic observation for a political/legal discussion.
As ever, Tony Benn's five questions are instructive: “what power do you have; where did you get it; in whose interests do you exercise it; to whom are you accountable; and, how can we get rid of you?”
=> https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1998-11-16/debates/db3...
No thanks.
As I have pointed out over and over market solutions don't work when there are huge power/capital differentials involved. Hoping some plucky little underdog product/service will lead to an exodus isn't going to happen.
Back in the day, Google ate Yahoo's lunch (along with Altavista, Lycos and everyone else) because Google had a genuine search engine (in the form of a graph database) whereas the incumbents were operating directories, and the classification/curation couldn't keep up with the volume of information being crawled. For those who were not around at the time, it's hard to communicate how different the products were. Incumbents let you search but also offered a huge number of categories, like a library catalog. Google looked like a joke website the first time you visited due to the lack of any categorical or navigational options, just this over-confident search field...except that it worked. It was like sorcery.
The reason I mention this is because in economics there's a concept of elasticity of demand, of how attached you are to a thing you already use or consume. Generally, you want to stick with what works. This is especially true where network effects come into play. Competitors that offer X + some incremental improvement usually fail; their best outcome is that X buys them and incorporates the incremental improvement (which is sometimes the competitors' ultimate goal). To lure people away from a successful product the additional benefit to the buyer has to be more like 100% than 10% or 20%, and that rarely happens. If you look at Youtube's contenders, they fall into specialized categories such as art stuff like Vimeo (extra access control, higher video quality/ delivery options), Twitch (emphasis on livestreaming and social, especially for gamers), Rumble (for Freeze Peach aficionados), Pornhub and the whole adult entertainment ecosystem, or high-end commercial content streaming.
So if you dream of beating YouTube in the market, you need to either occupy a niche they don't want to be in (most of which have already been occupied) or offer something that's radically different for the consumer. Being distributed/ FOSS/ blockchain/ whatever isn't it because only nerds care about that stuff. Nerds don't rule the marketplace, even when they build the marketplace: 95% of people do not care how something works or that it serves a higher purpose. It needs to offer a wholly different user experience, and really, it's kinda hard to see how you're gonna radically rethink TV.
You have a better chance to do something amazing in virtual reality or internet navigation in general, and provide a native offering in which Youtube is diminished to the minor status of a channel owner, ie your UI/brand is The Thing and YouTube is just a minor service provider icon below the content.
So the alternative is to address the situation legally. Monopoly complaints won't work, because the nice capitalists at the University of Chicago have institutionalized the idea that monopolies are fine as long as the public is happy, and the huge # of consumers using YouTube vastly outweighs the small # of creators who are pissed off with it, so good luck with your public interest argument. However, there might be some mileage in attacking the contract terms or alleging that YouTube has implicitly defamed creators by suspending them without explanation. Or you could go in a different direction and argue that YouTube is a sort of public utility, though then you need to decide whether you really want online video to be regulated by FCC.
Litigation would be expensive and stressful and would need to be a collective rather than individual undertaking, and a selective one at that - folks like Linux Experiment are sympathetic plaintiffs, folks like Logan Paul are not (you may think this shouldn't matter, but tough luck, it does). Chances are that such a case would almost certainly fail, but the object would be to make discovery and the trial excruciatingly embarrassing for youtube, which would mean refusing to settle and (probably) looking for specific performance like YT submitting to supervision of some kind in the form of a consent decree, rather than mere compensation. If you just ask them for money you'll (maybe) eventually get some but nothing will change, because asking for money is essentially the same as saying whoever has the most money gets to be king of the market and Alphabet has plenty of coins to toss in the direction of the peasants.
The potential upside here is not winning in court (a vanishingly unlikely possibility) or getting a big check to shut up and go away (nice and what your lawyers want, but basically selling out your principles), but either a change in the law from Congress (ha ha good luck) or a shift in the public's thinking about how contracts should work, the distribution of obligations, and how much market power is acceptable.