7 ms·

Cody'sLab channel suspended [video]

88 points by cisanti 9y ago

pdkl95 9y ago
Managing important infrastructure needs to be independent of exploitation, management, and/or regulation of content. You are either involved in editorial decisions or not. If you deliberately stay out of content decisions, and act like a common carrier, your liability should be limited and you get safe harbor protection. Editorializing and acting like a manager brings responsibility, - and liability. Yoytube (Goole/Alphabet) needs to decide which level of involvement they want to have? Do they want to stay out these decision and close accounts only with a valet court order? Or are they a manager with greater power... that might be liable for problems casused by their negligence.
cisanti 9y ago
Looks like he did some kind of experiment related to microwaves and bugs. People reported and the channel got taken down. Are people really that sensitive nowadays? And why they take the whole channel down, just disable the ads if the advertisers are the problem. This channel was really big, so I believe it gets plenty of attention.
- DanBC 9y ago
  You can't get taken down for a single video, so people were reporting other videos.
- ben_jones 9y ago
  It's my understanding that when content is taken down or otherwise flagged one of the first consequences is that monetization is removed. So imagine if your code got struck down in code review so they took away your last two week paycheck.
  - sweetheart 9y ago
    I don't think he meant _that_ kind of bug, ha!
  - masukomi 9y ago
    if my paycheck was as small as what most publishers get from single videos most of the time i wouldn't really care.
    - chillingeffect 9y ago
      Sure, but it's not about what "most publishers" get. It's about Cody staking his livelihood on youtube income. Typical income seems to be about $0.01 per view. His nitroglycerin video is worth almost $12k.
- curiousgal 9y ago
  Regardless of people's sensitivity, I think the system functioned the way it is supposed to function, enough people report the content, it gets taken down, and apparently this isn't the channel's first strike. The only criticism I see fit is that they should add a manual check of the content if the channel is big enough, that is before it gets automatically taken down.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    Maybe having a gradual response: video flagged, unlist video not the whole account. It seems he had a previous issue, but overall he was more good than bad.
  - otakucode 9y ago
    I disagree. Flagging a channel should disable it solely for the overly sensitive dimwitted user that voluntarily selected to view the video in the first place. YouTube is not a broadcast medium. Videos are available by voluntary positive action of the viewer only. Taking a video down, much less a whole channel, doesn't protect the viewer whose sensibilities were aroused. It only serves to forbid others from making the choice of whether or not to view the content themselves.
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      > It only serves to forbid others from making the choice of whether or not to view the content themselves. No, there is certain content that is forbidden by law in some countries, for example Holocaust denial, Nazi propaganda and other racist or otherwise discriminatory content. I do wonder why Youtube and Twitter don't disallow that kind of stuff by default, there's no reason for giving this kind of content any platform even if it's legal by law in the US. Also, fringe stuff like antivaxxers, "freemen/Reichsbürger movements", flat-earthers, chemtrail believers, other conspiracy theories or Russian fake news would be by far smaller if Youtube had decided that this content is not wanted on their platform. Instead Youtube willingly provides a platform for this content and therefore is directly responsible for the resulting problems.
- gervase 9y ago
  To set some context for those that haven't seen the video in question, he placed a jar of fruit flies into a microwave and turned it on. The flies were NOT harmed due to their size, and he went on to explain exactly why, discuss how microwaves function, EM wavelengths, standing waves, and so on. However, anyone who looked at the title only might believe that he was harming the fruit flies, which is potentially why that video got so many reports.
  - phnofive 9y ago
    He extended the experiment by showing that a grasshopper would be affected by the microwave’s wavelength; the bug exploded. This was later replaced with a grape, which is also larger than the fruit flies which would be safe in the same box.
    - PuffinBlue 9y ago
      Got a link to that exploding grasshopper exploding scene?
    - eco 9y ago
      Yeah, it was the grasshopper experiment that did it. The video was unlisted and only shared with his Patreon subscribers but definitely not something he should have done if he wanted to stay on YouTube's good side (something he realized since he redid it with a grape and put that one up instead of the grasshopper). I've been a subscriber of Cody's for years but he can be a bit reckless about things. Particularly about safety (just watch his recent video where he sliced through his finger with a shattered knife blade he slapped against nitroglycerin) but also about doing something like explode a grasshopper without too much forethought about how it'll be received. It's part of his charm but I can see it coming back to bite him again and again. I love the channel though. It's one of my favorites. He never seems to run out of ideas for interesting experiments unlike a lot of other sciency channels.
ben_jones 9y ago
Does Google not care to fix this issue, or do they fully understand the consequences to content creators and allow it to persist anyways? I.E. are they so beholden to advertisers that it has to be this way?
- rapsey 9y ago
  Does google care since there are no alternatives?
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  > Does Google not care to fix this issue Why would they care? YouTube is the only game in town for content like this. Where else is this channel, or a new one looking for a platform, gonna go?
  - manigandham 9y ago
    Vid.me is attempting to become this, although they are very far behind. The problem is that basic large-scale issues (business not technical) become hard or impossible to handle without serious investment and cashflow.
raiyu 9y ago
The problem with large platforms is that they are open to abuse you see the same problems at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc, it's basically an infinite problem. All of the "machine learning" algorithms aren't really that intelligent, because they have no real human context, so then you augment that with a trust and safety team to do manual review. When you couple that with a platform that has millions, or billions of users, you simply do not have enough trained people doing the review process so legitimate users, even with large followings, sometimes get nabbed. Just like legitimate people with less subscribers can be caught in the same web. Then you are basically at the mercy of the queue and the number of actual people they have doing the manual review work, which in YouTube's case I'm guessing is rather massive.
- specialp 9y ago
  Google really needs to have a human contact that can be reachable for channels with a large amount of subscribers. Advertisers do provide Google with nearly all of their revenue, but then again so do content providers as Google provides next to no content of their own. The fact that we have large channels being arbitrarily taken down with no warning shows how obtuse Google is.
  - confounded 9y ago
    Or maybe content creators need to get away from Google.
- mo45 9y ago
  It's still possible. Visit China. Both sides need to learn from each other to move forward. Blind faith in either fully open or fully controlled networks is the sign of unimaginative robotic mindsets that waste everyone's time.
  - frabbit 9y ago
    Blind faith in any paternalist system which makes judgements for us about which information is appropriate for us results in western democracy, whose death throes due to information poverty we are now seeing.
chillydawg 9y ago
The world is a better place with CodysLab, youtube need to sort their shit out. He may have made a couple of slightly dodgy videos, but the vast majority are really good and sometimes very impressive science videos.
- rukittenme 9y ago
  Which ones? I wasn't aware that Cody's Lab could receive strikes. The content is so tame, copyright free, and educational.
  - Carioca 9y ago
    Probably things that deal with explosives. He may have had a video on making nitroglycerin.
    - mmagin 9y ago
      And in the old days you just looked these things up in the encyclopedia...
    - simcop2387 9y ago
      Nothing on making it that I remember But several on how sensitive it is and how powerful.
      - morsch 9y ago
        He literally has a video titled "Making Nitroglycerine": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMmYPAS9xB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMmYPAS9xB0 Not that I have any reason to think this has anything to do with the channel suspension.
        simcop2387 9y ago
        My mistake, I hadn't seen that far back into his videos yet, he has way too many to watch them all. I was thinking of the recent ones where he was hitting nitroglycerine with knives and filming it at high speed.
jxramos 9y ago
from his video description "I will be moving videos over time to other sites and to here". I think this content duplication/redundancy (with likely vimeo and I'm not sure what else) is going to be the future of things to come. I wonder what sort of legal challenges may come to the fore if such battles ensue.
NateyJay 9y ago
A big problem with Youtube's three-strikes approach is that it's the same for all channels, big or small. It doesn't matter how much good content you've produced or how long you've been making it, if you get 3 strikes in a short period, your account is deleted, same as any channel. So channels that produce a lot of content or upload videos quickly have to be more careful about what they upload. There's no credit for good behaviour or allowance for the extra risk channels take if they post lots of videos, potentially getting a strike with each one. But little old me only uploads one or two videos a year. So I can afford to have every video copyright striked and I'll suffer no consequences since they expire in 6 months. It seems unfair.
- Already__Taken 9y ago
  We go through this every time there's a copyright law or something. Baseball is not a good system for moderation. At least the billion hours of content added you youtube constantly needs no nuance at all.
grabcocque 9y ago
Youtube are just really, really desperate to kill Youtube by any means necessary these days.
fapjacks 9y ago
Par for the course. Youtube has gone completely insane and it is leaving a huge opening for less completely insane competitor platforms.
amorphid 9y ago
Suggestions for YouTube I've seen here and elsewhere I like: - flagging a video suspends a video, not the channel - flagging a video hides the video (or channel) from the user who flags (this is one of my favorite features on Reddit, allowing me to distance myself from a few subreddits I prefer not to see) I do not like: - a few flags to a single video takes down the entire channel. It feels disproportionate to me.
- PuffinBlue 9y ago
  It's not just disproportionate, it's going to push people away from the platform. YouTube isn't too big to fail. If you push out the people who are creating the content your business model relies on, you'll fail. YouTube isn't too big to fail.

88 points by cisanti 9y ago

Managing important infrastructure needs to be independent of exploitation, management, and/or regulation of content. You are either involved in editorial decisions or not. If you deliberately stay out of content decisions, and act like a common carrier, your liability should be limited and you get safe harbor protection. Editorializing and acting like a manager brings responsibility, - and liability. Yoytube (Goole/Alphabet) needs to decide which level of involvement they want to have? Do they want to stay out these decision and close accounts only with a valet court order? Or are they a manager with greater power... that might be liable for problems casused by their negligence.

cisanti 9y ago

Looks like he did some kind of experiment related to microwaves and bugs. People reported and the channel got taken down. Are people really that sensitive nowadays? And why they take the whole channel down, just disable the ads if the advertisers are the problem. This channel was really big, so I believe it gets plenty of attention.

DanBC 9y ago
You can't get taken down for a single video, so people were reporting other videos.
ben_jones 9y ago
It's my understanding that when content is taken down or otherwise flagged one of the first consequences is that monetization is removed. So imagine if your code got struck down in code review so they took away your last two week paycheck.
- sweetheart 9y ago
  I don't think he meant _that_ kind of bug, ha!
- masukomi 9y ago
  if my paycheck was as small as what most publishers get from single videos most of the time i wouldn't really care.
  - chillingeffect 9y ago
    Sure, but it's not about what "most publishers" get. It's about Cody staking his livelihood on youtube income. Typical income seems to be about $0.01 per view. His nitroglycerin video is worth almost $12k.
curiousgal 9y ago
Regardless of people's sensitivity, I think the system functioned the way it is supposed to function, enough people report the content, it gets taken down, and apparently this isn't the channel's first strike. The only criticism I see fit is that they should add a manual check of the content if the channel is big enough, that is before it gets automatically taken down.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Maybe having a gradual response: video flagged, unlist video not the whole account. It seems he had a previous issue, but overall he was more good than bad.
- otakucode 9y ago
  I disagree. Flagging a channel should disable it solely for the overly sensitive dimwitted user that voluntarily selected to view the video in the first place. YouTube is not a broadcast medium. Videos are available by voluntary positive action of the viewer only. Taking a video down, much less a whole channel, doesn't protect the viewer whose sensibilities were aroused. It only serves to forbid others from making the choice of whether or not to view the content themselves.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > It only serves to forbid others from making the choice of whether or not to view the content themselves. No, there is certain content that is forbidden by law in some countries, for example Holocaust denial, Nazi propaganda and other racist or otherwise discriminatory content. I do wonder why Youtube and Twitter don't disallow that kind of stuff by default, there's no reason for giving this kind of content any platform even if it's legal by law in the US. Also, fringe stuff like antivaxxers, "freemen/Reichsbürger movements", flat-earthers, chemtrail believers, other conspiracy theories or Russian fake news would be by far smaller if Youtube had decided that this content is not wanted on their platform. Instead Youtube willingly provides a platform for this content and therefore is directly responsible for the resulting problems.
gervase 9y ago
To set some context for those that haven't seen the video in question, he placed a jar of fruit flies into a microwave and turned it on. The flies were NOT harmed due to their size, and he went on to explain exactly why, discuss how microwaves function, EM wavelengths, standing waves, and so on. However, anyone who looked at the title only might believe that he was harming the fruit flies, which is potentially why that video got so many reports.
- phnofive 9y ago
  He extended the experiment by showing that a grasshopper would be affected by the microwave’s wavelength; the bug exploded. This was later replaced with a grape, which is also larger than the fruit flies which would be safe in the same box.
  - PuffinBlue 9y ago
    Got a link to that exploding grasshopper exploding scene?
  - eco 9y ago
    Yeah, it was the grasshopper experiment that did it. The video was unlisted and only shared with his Patreon subscribers but definitely not something he should have done if he wanted to stay on YouTube's good side (something he realized since he redid it with a grape and put that one up instead of the grasshopper). I've been a subscriber of Cody's for years but he can be a bit reckless about things. Particularly about safety (just watch his recent video where he sliced through his finger with a shattered knife blade he slapped against nitroglycerin) but also about doing something like explode a grasshopper without too much forethought about how it'll be received. It's part of his charm but I can see it coming back to bite him again and again. I love the channel though. It's one of my favorites. He never seems to run out of ideas for interesting experiments unlike a lot of other sciency channels.

ben_jones 9y ago

Does Google not care to fix this issue, or do they fully understand the consequences to content creators and allow it to persist anyways? I.E. are they so beholden to advertisers that it has to be this way?

rapsey 9y ago
Does google care since there are no alternatives?
Analemma_ 9y ago
> Does Google not care to fix this issue Why would they care? YouTube is the only game in town for content like this. Where else is this channel, or a new one looking for a platform, gonna go?
- manigandham 9y ago
  Vid.me is attempting to become this, although they are very far behind. The problem is that basic large-scale issues (business not technical) become hard or impossible to handle without serious investment and cashflow.

raiyu 9y ago

The problem with large platforms is that they are open to abuse you see the same problems at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc, it's basically an infinite problem. All of the "machine learning" algorithms aren't really that intelligent, because they have no real human context, so then you augment that with a trust and safety team to do manual review. When you couple that with a platform that has millions, or billions of users, you simply do not have enough trained people doing the review process so legitimate users, even with large followings, sometimes get nabbed. Just like legitimate people with less subscribers can be caught in the same web. Then you are basically at the mercy of the queue and the number of actual people they have doing the manual review work, which in YouTube's case I'm guessing is rather massive.

specialp 9y ago
Google really needs to have a human contact that can be reachable for channels with a large amount of subscribers. Advertisers do provide Google with nearly all of their revenue, but then again so do content providers as Google provides next to no content of their own. The fact that we have large channels being arbitrarily taken down with no warning shows how obtuse Google is.
- confounded 9y ago
  Or maybe content creators need to get away from Google.
mo45 9y ago
It's still possible. Visit China. Both sides need to learn from each other to move forward. Blind faith in either fully open or fully controlled networks is the sign of unimaginative robotic mindsets that waste everyone's time.
- frabbit 9y ago
  Blind faith in any paternalist system which makes judgements for us about which information is appropriate for us results in western democracy, whose death throes due to information poverty we are now seeing.

chillydawg 9y ago

The world is a better place with CodysLab, youtube need to sort their shit out. He may have made a couple of slightly dodgy videos, but the vast majority are really good and sometimes very impressive science videos.

rukittenme 9y ago
Which ones? I wasn't aware that Cody's Lab could receive strikes. The content is so tame, copyright free, and educational.
- Carioca 9y ago
  Probably things that deal with explosives. He may have had a video on making nitroglycerin.
  - mmagin 9y ago
    And in the old days you just looked these things up in the encyclopedia...
  - simcop2387 9y ago
    Nothing on making it that I remember But several on how sensitive it is and how powerful.
    - morsch 9y ago
      He literally has a video titled "Making Nitroglycerine": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMmYPAS9xB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMmYPAS9xB0 Not that I have any reason to think this has anything to do with the channel suspension.
      - simcop2387 9y ago
        My mistake, I hadn't seen that far back into his videos yet, he has way too many to watch them all. I was thinking of the recent ones where he was hitting nitroglycerine with knives and filming it at high speed.

jxramos 9y ago

from his video description "I will be moving videos over time to other sites and to here". I think this content duplication/redundancy (with likely vimeo and I'm not sure what else) is going to be the future of things to come. I wonder what sort of legal challenges may come to the fore if such battles ensue.

NateyJay 9y ago

A big problem with Youtube's three-strikes approach is that it's the same for all channels, big or small. It doesn't matter how much good content you've produced or how long you've been making it, if you get 3 strikes in a short period, your account is deleted, same as any channel. So channels that produce a lot of content or upload videos quickly have to be more careful about what they upload. There's no credit for good behaviour or allowance for the extra risk channels take if they post lots of videos, potentially getting a strike with each one. But little old me only uploads one or two videos a year. So I can afford to have every video copyright striked and I'll suffer no consequences since they expire in 6 months. It seems unfair.

Already__Taken 9y ago
We go through this every time there's a copyright law or something. Baseball is not a good system for moderation. At least the billion hours of content added you youtube constantly needs no nuance at all.

grabcocque 9y ago

Youtube are just really, really desperate to kill Youtube by any means necessary these days.

fapjacks 9y ago

Par for the course. Youtube has gone completely insane and it is leaving a huge opening for less completely insane competitor platforms.

amorphid 9y ago

Suggestions for YouTube I've seen here and elsewhere I like: - flagging a video suspends a video, not the channel - flagging a video hides the video (or channel) from the user who flags (this is one of my favorite features on Reddit, allowing me to distance myself from a few subreddits I prefer not to see) I do not like: - a few flags to a single video takes down the entire channel. It feels disproportionate to me.

PuffinBlue 9y ago
It's not just disproportionate, it's going to push people away from the platform. YouTube isn't too big to fail. If you push out the people who are creating the content your business model relies on, you'll fail. YouTube isn't too big to fail.