>Revenue is down for YouTube, compared to last year.
Maybe this has something to do with becoming the defacto censorship arm of the government and banning/blocking/demonetizing/driving away many customers and viewers.
Downvoted, but seems like a reasonable comment to me. YouTube is still king, but their policies are unfriendly to creators and viewers alike. Over time, that will eat away at your audience.
The main negative I have is just the opposite: YT’s algorithm persistently pushing crazy alien theories, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson garbage into my feed, or worse. I wish they would censor that stuff more, because I’m not interested and no matter how many times I say “not interested”, it finds its way back in.
I either get "<Ideogogue> destroys <ideology>" videos or some really insane things, my favorite being videos from instructors who say they can teach you to fly if you give them thousands of dollars. By fly, they mean levitation and not airplanes.
To clarify, I don't consider YT's algorithmic choices to be "censorship" one way or another. Censorship is blocking, banning and/or demonetizing videos and preventing consumers from proactively deciding what they want to watch. I fully agree that allowing users to curate what Youtube suggests to them would be a massive improvement over the current system. If you are interested in learning more about actual Youtube censorship, Matt Taibi has been covering the issue for almost 2 years.
To clarify, you are saying that private corporations should be forced to pay for and carry whatever content your favorite political party wants?
Because the evil censorship that you believe the government is forcing does not exist. There is no legislation and there is no planned legislation from any us political party banning content, but there’s a hell of a lot of “conservative” legislation aimed at forcing YouTube etc to host racist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, and literal nazi content - in other words the exact BS the 1st amendment is meant to prevent the US gov from doing.
Wait I lied, I forgot the GOP has got huge amounts of legislation that tries to ban acknowledging that LGBT folk are human, that slavery happened, that conservative states are to this day doing everything they can to limit which Americans get to vote, etc
Given every time I see you commenting on HN it’s the same bigoted BS, that you then try to pass off as caring about treating things “fairly”, im going to stick with what I thought initially: you’re a bigot, and any time you claim that you are just interested in fairness it’s just another bit of bad faith BS rather than owning up to you being a bigot.
It’s America, and HN has no rules against being a bigot, but I’d rather you just preface your arguments with “I don’t think lgbt people deserve equal rights, I believe that anyone that doesn’t let people use their services to spew forth claims of straight white Christian superiority is is somehow censorship violating the 1st amendment, and I think anything that counters this view is propaganda”
>To clarify, you are saying that private corporations should be forced to pay for and carry whatever content your favorite political party wants?
I don't have a favorite political party, they are all trash (in the United States). But that isn't what I was saying. What I was saying was very straightforward: If you are a corporation that wants to maximize profits, driving away a segment of potential customers is a poor strategy.
Unless that serving that segment drives away another.
For example: I could be a shop in LA and say "I'll happily serve the nazis", but I'd be dumb if I thought that wasn't going to result in other potential customers going elsewhere.
> I don't have a favorite political party, they are all trash (in the United States)
This is BS - you can say that neither party is great, but this is acting like they are equivalently trash, which is objectively false, regardless of your politics. If your politics are "LGBT people are not people", or that only a specific type of person should be allowed to vote, then the liberal parties are trash, and the GOP is your savior. If your viewpoint is that all people should have the same basic rights then there is no way you can look at the GOP as being an option, no matter how fiscally conservative you might be.
But as I said later on, you have repeatedly taken the stance that LGBT folk aren't human, and then proclaimed you don't have a political viewpoint, which is BS that I'm tired of putting up with or ignoring.
Look, I do not care if you're an asshole in real life or just online, as we are unlikely to ever meet in real life. Even if we did, we are unlikely to agree on this topic because you've repeatedly taken the position that you think that "should this group of people have the same basic human rights as other humans" is a reasonable question, and that is only the case if you've already decided that that group is subhuman.
Like I said, I am just tired of reading your BS comments in which you try to act like you don't have politics, or that you aren't at the very least transphobic, when that's very clearly BS.
HN needs a way to "fork" branches of comments that have clearly gone astray, but have value on their own. Maybe turn comments into a red-black tree of some sort: black for regular comments, red for semi-related thoughts, collapsed by default.
>This is BS - you can say that neither party is great, but this is acting like they are equivalently trash
In my opinion both the Democratic and Republican parties are so worthless that they are indistinguishable. From their uniform support for endless war, US global military empire, the police state, ubiquitous surveillance and the endless transfer of wealth from working people to Wall Street rent-seekers, the two parties are the same in substance.
>you have repeatedly taken the stance that LGBT folk aren't human
This is a slanderous statement. I welcome you to quote and link to any comment where I suggested any such thing.
We have a serious mental health crisis post Covid lockdowns, and I hope you can get the help you need.
That's too simplistic of a statement. Sometimes you have to drive some segments out to keep others or to keep advertisers happy. If HN didn't put effort in curating the community would a lot of us still be here?
The limited, mostly consistent curating done by Dang and the staff from HN bears absolutely no resemblance to the widespread censorship on Youtube. For example, many interesting and substantive discussions about various Covid issues happened in HN comments that were completely banned on Youtube, Twitter and other government-compliant platforms in recent years. Certainly it is beneficial for a commercial platform to drive off those who are so offensive that they actively reduce demand from the network by driving away users, but it is absurd to think that has been the rational for Youtube's censorship policy. I would suggest that if HN implemented a Youtube-like censorship policy they would lose far more viewers than they would gain.
YouTube’s customers are mostly advertisers and their clients. And advertisers don’t want their adds next to content that will drive away their customers.