The streams are back up.<p>Yet, this thread quickly devolved into a discussion about the grand conspiracy to censor instead of the repeated failure of automated tools and the ease at which they're abused.
I think at this point we can just expect this stuff.<p>The ridiculousness of it, though. The rekieta law stream (which is <i>fantastic</i>, btw: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7YXd2M5E-8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7YXd2M5E-8</a>) has anywhere from 4-12 active lawyers giving commentary and context to everything that is happening.<p>This is exactly the type of thing we dreamed about when we were first creating the internet.<p>However: often times these smaller independent journalists and commenters go against the reality that media companies want you to believe you live in. Thus: they get censored. Rekieta lost almost 40,000 people who <i>were</i> getting live commentary from a diverse (idealogically) set of lawyers, and now must to places where these companies can assert more narrative control.<p>It's sad.
It doesn't fit the narrative that they and the entire mainstream media are so desperate to perpetuate. Allowing the plebs to see unbiased content and judge for themselves terrifies them. Same thing with removing the downvote count. They can't stand to see ratio of down to up votes on content about the current US administration, COVID, etc.
This is inverted moderation: they're penalizing anodyne, wonkish lawyers' podcasts, while leaving up most of the nonfactual, inflammatory ragebait. This is the exact opposite of how every platform professes to moderate.<p>The rules-violating stuff must look very impressive for ad engagement metrics.
Between stuffing non-monetized videos with ads, the dislike button thing, and capricious censorship, I'm seriously looking into self-hosting[0] my video and streamed content. Disregarding the difficulty of maintaining a following outside of the big platforms, do any of you HNers have experience with hosting your own video and streaming sites? What software do you use?<p>[0] I could also just switch platforms, but I have similar problems with all the big platforms. Vimeo is a potential paid option, but their streaming plans are a bit out of my budget.
It is pretty amazing isn't it?<p>Fun to work at Google these days? Get to manipulate the crowds big time?<p>Edit: at least you have now gotten me to watch it. Seriously interesting. Good thing the kid has gotten a good lawyer.
On that note, google-ing "WarRoom podcast" doesnt' return as the first result a link to the website itself [1], the first page is occupied by other podcast websites that "re-publish" (is that the correct word?) said podcast. Yandex does the correct thing, the website actually behind Bannon's podcast is the first in the SERPs, DDG has it as the 3rd result, still ok, because visible.<p>So it looks like the people at Alphabet/Google are well into suppressing political discourse, in which case I think a break-up of the company once this administration is voted out is totally in the cards.<p>[1] <a href="https://listen.warroom.org/?__cf_chl_rt_tk=gIeuKWPwW6dBmcIkh6.W_WkRhOun45t4XL.pZKdfe6c-1637015134-0-gaNycGzNCpE" rel="nofollow">https://listen.warroom.org/?__cf_chl_rt_tk=gIeuKWPwW6dBmcIkh...</a>
I have said it at the very beginning of this case. As much as I hate cameras everywhere, this is the one time, I am so glad everyone can see exactly what happened. There is no 'he said, she said'. We can all see what happened from multiple angles ( including FBI drone ).<p>If that is the case, it goes down to the 'narrative'. Was the Kyle a poor kid trying to get away from vicious mob and killing in self-defense, a blood-thirsty vigilante with ties white supremacist movement, or something in between?<p>A lot of people have already decided. At this point, I am just waiting to see if the jury upholds the right to self-defense. If they don't, riots next year are bound to be much worse.
I really want to stress that while the internet has enabled just about everyone to act as a citizen journalist, it is not the ubiquity of information that matters, but rather, the access to information. YouTube and Google wield great power when it comes to gatekeeping information. The sinister part is that plenty of people, left and right, will defend Google's ability to do this merely because they are "a private company".
It's hilarious how some people are always saying everything is some conspiracy. You work at any of these companies (YouTube, Twitter, Meta, Snap) and the amount of internal outages is so frequent your eyes glaze over. Not to say that the outages necessarily affect users, but so much so that I just assume all of this stuff is just the result of automation gone wrong.<p>The bar for conspiracy I think needs to be pretty high.<p>Perfect example of this is "X." X is some highly mainstream, controversial thing happening right now. "X" has a lot of videos. YouTube starts removing videos of "X". People start to say YouTube is censoring. Maybe they are. However it's more likely that the increased traffic to "X" and the fact that it's controversial results in more people (in aggregate) using built in tools such as commenting, flagging , etc. to highlight the video. Some criterion might be met and high activity videos that are "controversial" might be removed or throttled.<p>From the outside it looks like a conspiracy. I'd love for someone to post conclusive evidence of YouTube engaged in some conspiracy around these livestreams.
This might be happening because the same feed is available on YouTube TV, so similar content might be hit by the Content ID system meant to stop people from restreaming TV on YouTube.
YouTube is the great digital video censorship platform. My all time favorite was when they censored an academic conference on censorship. The HN discussion on it:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26008217" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26008217</a>
Is it possible for us to put aside the edgelord screeching over censorship and instead talk rationally about content distribution regulations, required public APIs, and using the Post Office for things like email/videos/blogs/PGP keys/etc?
I'd suggest those who haven't watched at least the closing arguments from both sides (4 hrs of video in total) to watch it first.<p>There's no point in sounding like legal experts or arguing over semantics for the sake of defending the position you have already taken before spending the time watching the full version of both sides arguments.<p><a href="https://youtube.com/c/fox6milwaukee" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/c/fox6milwaukee</a>
Is it just me or does it seem like these "accidents" impact smaller and perhaps less politically authoritative channels than the big channels? I am not just talking about this incident but others as well.
Never forget that Susan Wojcicki won a free speech award sponsored by YouTube. [0]<p>Never forget it.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/youtube-ceo-susan-wojcicki-gets-freedom-expression-award-sponsored-youtube-1585147" rel="nofollow">https://www.newsweek.com/youtube-ceo-susan-wojcicki-gets-fre...</a>
This is why we must reject big tech's monopoly on moderation.<p>I wrote this essay here which you should read next:<p><a href="https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....</a>
YouTube also just deleted the accounts of the German independent investigatory committee www.corona-ausschuss.de who are an important information source for many German citizen.