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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

So, you raise some interesting points, but this morning I saw this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HBaIRPhClw Denys Davydov is a Ukrainian, hometown Sevastopol, whose channel was mostly about his life as a commercial aviation pilot until the war started. He does not show any of the sort of content you discuss, and is definitely not cheerleading anyone's death. He started a Telegram channel recently so that he could post videos which he did not think would be wanted on a YouTube channel. He never posted videos that showed actual killing, nor did he otherwise cross the line you describe. Nonetheless, he's demonetized today, apparently.

Which all suggests, there is something going on other than "no cheerleading deaths".

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>Denys Davydov is a Ukrainian, hometown Sevastopol, whose channel was mostly about his life as a commercial aviation pilot until the war started. He does not show any of the sort of content you discuss, and is definitely not cheerleading anyone's death [...] Which all suggests, there is something going on other than "no cheerleading deaths".

Couple of possibilities:

- it may be a temporary false-positive for demonetization : their A.I. algorithm with (with imperfect heuristics) scanned a bunch of channels for controversial Ukraine content and automatically demonetized them skipping any human judgement. In some cases, the youtubers appeal it and they get re-monetized again. As an example, the youtube aviation channel "blancolirio" went through this. He started making videos about Boeing 737-MAX which automatically got de-monetized by the algorithm because it had "737MAX" in the titles but his later crash-analysis videos got monetized after human review. E.g. He wrote[1] "(Note: after initially demonetizing this video, after a human review YT re-monetized it...Why? I have No Idea.)" And his recent video analyzing Las Vegas plane crash is also monetized with Youtube ads.[2]

- Youtube suddenly got stricter about the Ukraine topic so more channels are getting caught up in the dragnet. If that's the case, hopefully the high-quality channels will appeal and a human reviewing it will turn on monetization again. I'm guessing a quality channel like Perun will pass human review and get re-monetized to override the auto-demonetization. However, the channel (Artur Rehi) cited by this particular thread probably will not because his type of content is not "advertiser-friendly".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8_vl3theT8, [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2Up_Cw8X-g

Except he is VERY subjective towards Ukrainians and cheering for their gains in war which falls within "condones, exploits or dismisses". His channel is a propaganda for Ukrainians, understandably so. Denys has higher quality content and I watch him from time to time but this is business. When/If this war ends you will have the entire "woke" population turning on YT for monetising this type of content, benefiting from death and drama of war.

Now let's say you're on the other end, an advertiser that pays for placements, and you see your ads showing on videos where people literally die on camera, with funny reactions, videos and sounds. Do you think that it has the potential of ruining your business or not? Sorry to say but I take YT's side in this matter.

I think it's a very rare viewer who actually thinks the advertiser YouTube slapped on a video actually condones or even saw what is in the video.

Nobody thinks an advertiser paid for a video of death and destruction. Everyone knows that sort of content is 100% between the uploader and YouTube.

I doubled my Patreon contribution to Denys this morning.

Patreon offers no way to add a one-time boost, which sucks.

Also added one for Suchomimus, who I assume has also been hit.

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