How could some sanity checks be worse than NO sanity checks at all? In the YouTube case, I mean. This is happening ALL the time.

An inconsistently applied sanity check creates a false sense of security. Like how a safety barrier that isn't strong enough to take someone's weight might be worse than no barrier.

Yeah, some people recommend something like

    alias rm=‘rm -i’

Unfortunately, as soon as you’re on another computer or at someone else’s shell, you’ll be more comfortable thinking less about rm-ing things and the sanity check won’t be there.

The better recommendation is to alias rm -i to del:

    alias del='rm -i'

And then get in the habit of using 'del' unless you really want a no-confirmation delete.

Then when you are on another computer or at someone else's shell you get:

    del: command not found

Instead of having a bunch of files silently deleted.

Another trick is to run

    touch —- -i 

In important directories. Then rm -rf * expands to rm -rf .... -i ... and you get the “are you sure” prompt.

This strategy will fail pretty badly if you're on someone else's computer using Windows or DOS, where 'del' is the delete command.

Does `del -rf /` do a lot on Windows?

I doubt it, but `del *` should do the same thing on both systems.

Except that on windows, "del" defaults to prompting "are you sure" when one types "del *".

Right, I understand the concept. What I'm saying is that a safety barrier that sometimes doesn't work is better than rails that always guide you off a cliff; which is currently the YouTube model.

Many of the cases we hear about don't seem to be mistakes, including this one. Sometimes nobody can figure out any possible reason for a ban and sometimes it gets reinstated (that's the undo feature in action). But often there are obvious copyright issues or offensive material and the channel owner only goes clutching at fair use or freedom of speech after the ship has sailed.

For the same reason human babysitters of autonomous vehicles don't succeed in preventing pedestrians from getting run over.

Right, but a human babysitter is better than NO babysitter.

That's the same mentality of people stating because one form of pollution reduction or green energy generation isn't solving the problem that it's not worth attempting to do what you can when you can where you can. Those small moves are what gets the thing moving.