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Comment by phtrivier | Hacker News Reader

Might be moot, but the shutdown email mentions "spam, scam or deceptive practices", not just "reasons".

Without any context about the owner of the channel, the reader has no way to know how unfair the shutdown is.

I understand from the HN thread that the dev is well known and that the shutdown seems unfair - but it's always hard to share the outrage in this situation.

Best of luck to the channel's owner - let's hope the appeal ends up in front of a human being.

Now, let's all go back on youtube, to watch suggested videos about fake news interspersed with ads for crypto scam.

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For what it's worth, I pinged someone about it.

YouTube is notorious for that, though. With that context, this is one more instance, showing that the issue persists. I remember a German youtuber tried to unionize creators through IG Metall, though there doesn't seem to be any news in years so I'm not sure it went anywhere. https://fairtube.info/en/seite/press-coverage-of-fairtube/

I've had good luck with Firefox, ublock origin, and sponsorblock. Can't remember the last time I saw an ad, automated or otherwise. There's also an extension that changes your default page to "subscriptions" instead of "home." I do recall using the ad blocker to hide the side panel of video recommendations, too. At least for now, youtube really is a free ride for me.

Have you ever tried out librewolf? It's blue!

> but it's always hard to share the outrage in this situation

I'm not really sure what makes raging about this so hard for you. Current YouTube practice is equivalent to locking up a citizen for "thievery" and "reasons" without providing any evidence of such at any point.

And sure, few hundreds years ago this course of action would fly. But today we advanced a bit and demand that our justice is a bit more just. I don't see why we should demand less of the corporations. Or do we just accept their role as a pocket of feudalism in modern society? Accepting undemocratic small planned economies of corporations is one thing, accepting customers to be their serfs is another.

How does this make sense when zero percent of uploaded youtube videos are owned by the creators?

It’s not like they are paintings loaned to an art gallery, where the gallery might have some obligations to preserve, return, etc.

From what I understand there’s no liability even if the board of directors decide to shut down Youthbe tomorrow and permanently delete every uploaded video.

> How does this make sense when zero percent of uploaded youtube videos are owned by the creators?

Says who and why should citizens of democratic countries listen to them? YouTube is a staple. If you reach this size, there are gonna be some rules. At least there should be.

> From what I understand there’s no liability even if the board of directors decide to shut down Youthbe tomorrow and permanently delete every uploaded video.

They are welcomed to do that. But deciding to refuse service on arbitrary grounds to one client is something they shouldn't be allowed to do. Otherwise why not ban people because they are Jewish or gay or just at random to sow fear? When you offer your services to the public then you shouldn't be allowed to refuse service to any member of the public without a very good and specific reason.

But even new legislation, assuming it can be rammed through Congress within your lifetime, can’t retroactively apply to uploaded videos which already were copied in fact…?

I thought the point was about how easily one can feel rage about this not if the situation can realistically be improved in any way.

How does this matter?

The prior comment wasn’t posted randomly in some arbitrary location.

It was in response to a specific comment in a specific location.

And I was refering to specific phrase of it.

Namely:

> but it's always hard to share the outrage in this situation

Okay… so how does it matter in relation to the prior two comments?

At this point I have no idea, so have a nice day. ;-)

> Current YouTube practice is equivalent to locking up a citizen for "thievery" and "reasons" without providing any evidence of such at any point.

No, it's not even that remotely, and to equate the two shows massive ignorance.

This is like a book publisher of its own accord (without the government forcing them to) deciding that they do not want to publish your book anymore. Unless you have an explicit and enforceable contract with them that says otherwise then they're well within their rights to stop publishing your book.

If you don't like it then don't use their platform, and if you're using YouTube to host things for your business then it would be a really good idea to have a backup host in place that you can direct users to.

Show me a book publisher comparable to YouTube. Quantity is quality. YouTube is more akin to a small country than a book publisher.

YouTube is also not locking you in a cell and physically depriving you of your freedom as opposed to the original analogy.

There's no book publisher as big as YouTube/Google but that doesn't break the analogy, and there are plenty of other places you can host video online.

Maybe locking up is wrong analogy. Rather YouTube is just torching everything you've built instead.

> There's no book publisher as big as YouTube/Google

There's nothing as big as YouTube/Google and that's why analogy breaks.

Your analogy with publishers works only if there's relevant competition and there's none. YouTube is analogue to state publisher and others are underground small printers who's main occupation is printing opposition leaflets. There's no competition between YouTube and those entities.

> But today we advanced a bit and demand that our justice is a bit more just.

Like you, I used to believe this. Recent events have me re-examining my assumptions.

> but it's always hard to share the outrage in this situation

Clarification needed indeed: i did not meant "hard to share" because I don't feel empathy for the creator ; I meant "hard" in the sense that:

* I did not know beforehand anything about the creator,

* Neither the post, nor, surprisingly, the HN thread, gave much context about what the creator where accused of

* But the thread was full of outrage ; that I was, unfortunately, not entirely comfortable sharing.

But again, moot point - I completely agree that youtube automated moderation is a living advertisement for human moderation.

I'm astounded by how crap the ads on Youtube now are. Back when the Adcopalypse happened they stated they were going to clean up the ads shown, but now it's just AI generated crap.

You could have looked up Sinevibes, they have a good internet presence.

This is a pretty good comment, except I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make with the last line.

I wanted to highlight the irony of youtube closing a channel for "scams", given that about half of the few ads I still see in youtube are for crypto scams, fad diets, fake cancer medecines, etc...

Thank FSM for ad blockers and nebula.

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