YT to me is more like Kowloon Walled City - massive and amazing as a monolithic entity, and you can find amazing gems - but when you look closely, its a lawless cess-pool with a confusing and almost evil method of getting around - and things that shouldn't be anywhere near each-other are practically roommates, rather than neighbors. And you should not trust any strangers you come across, no matter what they promise you. Also, its a terrible place for children to be unattended - and is largely ungoverned by those who should be governing it...
Gambling sites masquerading as merchandise seems like it is not in any grey area, it's purely negative. This type of service may even be strictly illegal, so it's a pretty strange situation to see it being advertised so heavily in a major way.
So basically they're engaging in borderline false advertising targeted at people who are by definition emotionally and psychologically vulnerable and compromised.
And the youtube side of it is that a whole host of youtubers promoted this service on their platforms.
Not to mention that their terms dictate they can sell your data. Which obviously is unexpected from a“medical” company.
That seems like it must be skirting the HIPAA line very closely.
This happened a while ago so I don't remember everything, but I believe the company was like an Uber for therapy, rather than providing therapy directly.
Can you explain for those of us out of the loop...
I'm trying to imagine some 14 year old boy trying to explain to an angry mother that yes, he's that interested in the boring day to day life details of an Asian mother.
But as you note, it's mostly a good deal for the producers that can monetize the videos a lot easier on a legit platform like YouTube, and there is probably a reasonably big captive market of people who are trapped behind porn filters.
On the one hand, there's a woman providing hours and hours of gratuitous upskirt shots and flashing her panties, made creepy because of the role the children play in it. The sheer scale of the content being uploaded makes it feel less innocuous to me, so it's hard to think this is just a woman indulging in a mild fetish...something else must be going on.
After watching the ASMR video though, I felt utterly disgusted. The mother was on record saying it was fine, and that she was writing 'sassy' role-play stuff that has blatant sexual undertones. It felt to me like a clear case of child exploitation, given the number of subscribers and the mildly pornographic subtext.
I remember some time ago there was another popular youtube channel that was basically a case study on the root cause of Complex PTSD: the father would consistently gaslight one of his kids, under the guise of horseplay, in order to broadcast his kid's reaction to such bullying to a wider audience. Presumably because the parents were making bank from it.
This should not come as a surprise—the internet is full of anything you could imagine and 'rule 34' came about for a reason—but I didn't expect to see something bordering CP on Youtube. Given the monetisation model Youtube has now, I can see why popular YT 'stars' will completely detach from their humanity in order to bring home more bacon.
You're thinking of DaddyOFive.
They lost custody of two of their kids (the ones they treated the worst) and eventually got banned from YouTube. Now they have a website, FamilyOFive (he numbers still work because 7 - 2 = 5), where they offer paid content.
I can't begin to understand what it takes, mentally, to lose two of your kids, and then come back to the internet asking for more eyeballs. They have a "Meet The Family" page on their site that omits two of the children, who are no longer part of their family as a result of their behavior. I would have probably had suicidal thoughts just writing that page, and I'm not making a joke or hyperbole here. Sure, who am I to say what sort of punishment they deserve? But good god, you lose two of your kids, you should either be angry or depressed or both, not going straight back to the life you had that led you there. I feel bad for these people.
I assume that "bikini girl" prepended to any video title attract more views than videos of me. "old, chubby bald dude fishing in real life" doesn't seem like a great clickbait title. If there's enough money to be made in "slice of life" videos, I guess it could attract the attention of human traffickers.
That was beautiful, and nothing at all like the sexual ones we're discussing.
I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing.
How do you think that could be a good thing? Seems like an obviously bad thing to me.
Maybe, but it seems like people who fall into the echo chamber just vote for the evil doers instead.
If they're not fined more than they profit then they're not going to change it.
The incentives of YouTube and Youtubers are aligned against the better interests of society; but that's true of a lot of capitalist activity -- the only way it is going to change is via mass action of the populous (direct action [which might be as simple as changing viewing habits], or legislation).
"Stop with this trending nonsense, stop with this "your friends liked" nonsense, stop with this "in case your missed it" nonsense, take your hands off me and just let me mindlessly click and watch whatever videos I feel like watching and react to the tweets I want to react to, I don't need your damn help knowing what my friends are doing or feeling like I need to like something because the platform detected that Jim liked it six hours ago since my last login".
For all this talk about FOMO, it's impossible for me, personally, to NOT look at the culpability the platforms have in it by nagging me all the time about what everyone else is doing and be annoyed by it. I know what they're doing, I see it. I don't need your helicopter parenting to know that, twitter. Keep the trolls in line, keep the lights on, otherwise get out of the way.
- Sort by time.
- Sort by creator/channel.
- Sort by creator selected content type (fallible).
- Search (a la Google, which sucks on Youtube).
- ???
I wonder if these would be sufficient? Maybe something like Reddit/HN is necessary; some human aggregation and interaction. Would a Reddit style interface work well for video?
A landing page with trending videos (upvotes, comments, threads, etc.), links out to popular subjects/sub-reddits, and so on. Perhaps with an interface like HN which forces people together in one kind of communication (in threads), generous wait periods for new members, and so on...
I suppose that only considers the viewer's use-case. What about monetization? What about creators?
Wait what?
- Frequency and quantity of the uploads indicated she was doing these videos more than full-time
- No verbal interaction other than an occasional glare at cameraman
- Vietnam, not (say) America or Europe
I'd like to give the benefit of the doubt, but something makes me deeply uncomfortable about it.
In America I generally trust that the FBI will have no mercy when cracking down on human trafficking. I also trust that the vast majority of sex workers are legit, consenting people who consciously chose to do it.
I don't know much about Vietnam, but I am guessing police/FBI-esque corruption is much higher than America/Europe which is why I would also guess that this accounts for the larger percentage of sex workers there that are trafficked.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
How can you say "just because"? Several other reasons were plainly listed?
I might also note that I lived in southeast Asia for many years. There's a huge amount of trafficking that isn't being reported to the Atlantic website or the US State department there.
If you'd review the guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them, we'd appreciate it. This one is particularly relevant: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://youtu.be/3ewyEF3Wd9M
TL;DW - Youtubers with large young audiences are promoting loot box style gambling.
Youtube seems like the wild west.
On the dark side we have channels bursting with (possibly) human trafficked vietnamese women producing sexual content masquerading as slice-of-life, huge youtubers promoting gambling to children, elsagate, etc.
On the light side we have people's videos being flagged for copyright violations over literal sounds of nature, music they produced themselves, or music playing in the background. Also "fair use" doesn't exist on YouTube - a 1 second clip is enough for a company to claim your video apparently.
There are still a lot of niche channels I love on YouTube but I would never want to try to make a living producing content on that platform myself... seems too volatile.