>There's no such thing as neutrality. Leaving up a popular anti-vax video is just as political a decision as taking it down.

Nonsense. We don't apply this standard to anything else in life.

I'm not sure what "elsewhere in life" means, but bookstores choose what books they will sell while also not necessarily endorsing every book they carry.

and

> I refuse to take down this video, because I do not think it needs to be taken down

are two VERY different things. The first one is a political choice about taking down videos in general. The second one is a political choice about a specific topic. The second one is more or less similar to taking down the video because you think it needs to be taken down (same topic, different political decision)... the first one is absolutely nothing like that.

Edit: In case it wasn't clear (because I replied in the wrong place), this is the comment I was discussing

> There's no such thing as neutrality. Leaving up a popular anti-vax video is just as political a decision as taking it down.

While it may be "just as political", it's a political about a totally different thing.

Anyway, a social platform that only removes illegal content (not even spam?) sounds absolutely dreadful and I would not use it and no one would pay to advertise on it.

If my friends bring me dreadful content that I don't like, I'm not sure we'll stay friends. If my friends are spamming, I'll ask them to stop and if they continue, I'm not going to stay friends (or at least I'll unfollow them where they're spamming).

If people post garbage to my posts, I'll delete their garbage and restrict access to my posts.

There's no need for the social platform to do moderation, until it starts putting unrelated people's content in front of me; which is something I don't really want from a social platform.

Presumably, you don’t notice you’re on a moderated platform, but HN is very much not an unmoderated free-for-all.

It would be interesting to have a social platform where you can only see mutual connections. I imagine it'd have a hard time competing with email and group texts and all the other ways people who already know each other can stay in touch.

If I'm searching for a video, I try to do it in a web search, and likely it'll lead to YouTube, and hopefully it'll actually be useful content (or Rick Astley, I actually like that song).

Anyway, if I were YouTube, I would turn off comments everywhere, and review videos before including them in recommendations (which would leave a lot of videos out of that section) and probably have a lot lower views.

Why is it political? They didn't commission the content or request that it be created and hosted on their platform in any way. They're offering the same reasonable self-hosting process that they offer to anyone who shows up with an email address.

It only seems to become political when you decide to take action and either protect or remove the material. You're now no longer a disinterested third party, you're making editorial decisions and it's hard to believe they've taken this step without considering the impact of those decisions.

Other publishing media do not have this standard. For example, the radio waves are another medium where the FCC (which regulates them) could say that only certain things are allowed, or they could say you can broadcast whatever you want. (In fact I think they regulate content, re: obscenity, but I don't want to look it up right now.)

So again, the idea of being only a neutral 3rd party who hosts videos for all-comers is a choice, which has political implications.

They can only do so because there is a limited number of them and users cannot share the space, so it must be licensed to be practically useful.

Also, the FCC cannot dictate to a station what it can and cannot air, the FCC can enforce _community standards_ of the community which is being served by that radio station. They're not in a position to go searching for violations and then act upon them, they merely respond to complaints from the communities themselves.

> So again, the idea of being only a neutral 3rd party who hosts videos for all-comers is a choice, which has political implications.

Yes, but the service clearly exists to make money.. not to make a political statement; which I agree may be incidental, but that shouldn't be the basis for interpreting their actions.

And profiting from it. The scope changes slightly when you realize your business could get sued repeatedly because you promoted misinformation (which is how it would be spun) and someone died because they followed that misinformation.

This is risk, and few of these businesses want to tackle that risk apparently.

It's a testament to how well marketers over the decades have sold the idea that companies care about anything other than their shareholders that people mistake profit-driven motivation for political stances.

> popular anti-vax

since Anti-Vax has now been refined to include anyone that opposes government mandated vaccinations, I am a Vaxxed Anti-Vaxer as I oppose all government mandates. People should be free to choose on their own if they want a vaccine or any other medical treatment.

So should a video of me expressing this position be removed under an "anti-vaxx" policy?

But I think you'd find two problems: determining what could be illegal is really hard (what's a "true threat" and what's a tasteless joke?), and also you'd end up with a community that looks a lot like 4chan or parler. Not a place I would choose to hang out.

While that may be true.. do you not believe that the exceptional openness of either of those two platforms has an impact on places outside of them? Do you think there's no intangible benefits to you by these places merely existing?

I have yet to hear a positive argument for their existence, and "well it collects the dirtbags!" is actually not one. I spent years tracking reactionary and fascist movements on the internet and how they interrelate and spread information; these sites more or less exist to do exactly that. The targeted harassment campagins that target random people they've decided not to like--that's just "for the lulz".

Oh, there's definitely an impact.

> Do you think there's no intangible benefits to you by these places merely existing?

Yeah, the campaigns to harass a game emulator developer to suicide because "40% is a good start" are a fantastic benefit to society, obviously.

So the "just create your own platform" trope has be tried and failed.

If you haven’t seen the issue with echo chambers by now… you’re in one.

I have locals.com account, reddit accounts (which is diminishing amount of my usage as they continue to "mainstream" aka censor the site) , and HN, that is pretty much it for me

So if I were to continuously upload hours-long videos of digital noise, thousands of them, millions, YouTube ought to be obligated to host these ersatz videos, and not remove them unless they were deemed illegal? In that case, someone could in theory run a successful encrypted cloud backup business off YouTube's servers. Or just use YouTube as a massive versioning backup for their own personal data, confident in the knowledge that the files can never be deleted.

A lot of the replies to your comment fixate on this, since they take issue with “everything is political”. But I think it’s very true, and agree with you.

Why should YouTube host anything and everything that random anonymous users decide to upload? Why is this /holy/ act of uploading deemed undoable and unrevocable?

It’s a very weird way of thinking that it’s political only if the video is removed, but not if it is kept online.

Because keeping it up is the default, while you have to go out of your way to remove it.

If I own a store, is it as much of a political act to allow Trump supporters to shop there as it is to ban them?

That's a misconception, and basically what the whole trolley problem is all about. Doing nothing is not the same as doing something. Each have their own ethical consequences and it's not as easy as you think to spurt out the "right" answer. Sure, you might have a preference that's difficult for others to argue against or for, but others also have the right to reach a different conclusion.

With that being said, may I ask you what you know about vaccination? Are you using information from articles you've read online from "authorized" sources, or are you an expert on the matter? Again my point here is not to say that you're wrong or right, you're absolutely free to reach whatever conclusion you desire, but it's really difficult even for actual experts in the medical field to know what's going on currently, who's motivated by altruism, greed, selfishness, or cronyism. Taking up these stands and pretending it's "science" is an insult to science, because "science" is ever evolving and there's no such thing as consensus in the scientific process.

It is like getting a warrant to search your house. It can be expedite if someone is in grave danger.