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The author conflates two things. The right to biohack at home and Youtube's alleged obligation to let him broadcast his material. The first one is okay, as lon

The author conflates two things. The right to biohack at home and Youtube's alleged obligation to let him broadcast his material. The first one is okay, as long as we're not talking about experiments that may be dangerous to the public. (which he seems to categorically reject for some reason, while home made bioterrorism is a real threat), the second one just doesn't follow at all. Youtube has no realistic way to tell whether someone producing home-made science on youtube is a phd ex-nasa biohacker who follows best practices or just a complete quack who tries to sell dangerous fake remedies to vulnerable people. In practice the incentive to promote the latter probably far outweighs the former in number given the huge, generic audience on Youtube. 77% of the Youtube audience in the US are 17-25 years old, it's not some niche forum for engineers and the notion that they can read scientific papers and weed out legitimate science created at home from misinformation is absurd. The correct platform for something like this is a separate forum or community where enthusiasts meet with some barrier to entry, not the mass media. I immediately question the motive of someone who promotes individual science or 'hacking' and seeks the largest mass media audience. I think the motive is much more straight forward. The author has a company that sells genetic engineering kits to people and by banning him from Youtube that impacts him financially. I personally think Biohacking and eccentric science is cool, but the appropriate audience for the kind of things he did, like treat himself with CRISPR or replace his entire microbiome to treat IBS is probably a community more self-selected than HN, not Youtube, which is mainstream television for young adults.

foerbert 5y ago
I didn't get the impression the author alleged YouTube had any obligation to let him broadcast his material. He even mentioned understanding why YouTube would be wary of his content, and mostly was unhappy that YouTube did not put some of their profits into being able to discriminate between home-made science and the quacks exploiting the vulnerable. But none of this article made me even think the author believed YouTube had some sort of obligation to host content they did not wish to. He just wasn't happy with the decision they made.
- equality_1138 5y ago
  Exactly. I read this as a much broader critique of the scientific community. As YouTube is seen as a mass media company, it's not hard to accept their content decisions. He didn't fight it. I also believe any company that markets themselves as tech industry should not be this cagey about their relationship to science. It's an ethical question not a legal one. Jumping to the legal aspect seems like a big misunderstanding of the piece. Also funny to question whether the guy is acting on financial incentives to promote his ideas. Of course he does.
  - foerbert 5y ago
    I don't think the financial incentives question was so much a sincere question as it was bringing up a concern about other influences on his position. I think it's a valid one. Humans are really bad at fully separating and understanding our influences, never mind selectively ignoring some them. Given the perception of many YouTubers as being more 'pure' ideological advocates, I think it's reasonable to bring up. Now to be fair, most any YouTuber that's likely to be a topic of discussion has almost certainly moved far past the point of actually being that 'pure' ideological advocate.
    - equality_1138 5y ago
      The article mentions about selling kits, so it's pretty obvious that his videos would be at least partially motivated by commercial aspirations. Yes? I called the comment silly as it seemed to be saying "I not only disapprove of this entrepreneur's target market, he is also employing deceptive marketing tactics"
      - foerbert 5y ago
        I mean yes, but also no? And I think a lot of it depends on how much you want to take from the overall tone of the comment vs a particular statement in it. Not everybody is going to read the whole article. Not everybody is going to put 2 and 2 together while they're reading and reevaluate his previous statements with that new context. I think it's pertinent information when evaluating his statements and coming to a decision about how you feel these things should be handled. I'd say mentioning his financial interest is more akin to a pointed summary That said I don't think this was an attempt a deception, nor particularly deceptive given all the context. But still, it's relevant. Some people would give an explicit disclaimer, others not. I don't think this is clear cut enough to say one way is absolutely correct.
reginold 5y ago
Agreed - the lesson here is platforms like YouTube have a lot more control than most assume. An easy to use, censorship resistant, video host seems needed.
- vippy 5y ago
  That's an interesting, and entirely unrelated, takeaway given what Barrin92 wrote.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  They have precisely as much control as anyone familiar with US law and business practice should expect: total control. As for censorship, I'm sorry but I don't consider what even a corporation whose operation is on the scale of YT or FB does to be censorship.
  - sneak 5y ago
    It's still censorship even if it's not the government. User A posts content. User B subscribes. Entity C decides that B is not allowed to read what A has to say. C is a censor.
    - analognoise 5y ago
      Are you a censor if you own the platform? You can't come into my print shop and print Nazi literature. Could you print it yourself? Sure. So I'm not preventing you from printing it - I'm preventing you from printing it on my equipment. I.E - No, that's not censorship.
      - kbenson 5y ago
        It is censorship, it's just that not all censorship is bad, and people should care more about the details than that the definition fits for a word they have knee-jerk reactions to.
        5y ago
mattnewton 5y ago
> Youtube has no realistic way to tell whether someone producing home-made science on youtube is a phd ex-nasa biohacker who follows best practices or just a complete quack who tries to sell dangerous fake remedies to vulnerable people. In practice the incentive to promote the latter probably far outweighs the former in number given the huge, generic audience on Youtube. I think that the author would agree with you here- but it’s still worth calling out as something that changes if we move from a centralized content production model like PBS to distributed with moderation like YouTube. I think that they get the “cause” wrong, attributing too much to the “cult” of mainstream science, when it seems like a logistics problem, but the effect is still that no one is able to do a deep dive on validating content. The best they can do is diagnose how far content seems to be from the mean.
azirbel 5y ago
What I got from the article was that system as a whole is consistently throwing roadblocks in the way of experimental/small-time science. The author focuses on YouTube, but also cites a government investigation as well as deplatforming by PayPal, Square, LinkedIn, Amazon, Facebook, and Patreon. These are private companies, with their own policies, but private companies are part of the system too. So I don't think the concerns are conflated. Regarding YouTube, I think the author would agree with you: > The problem is big tech companies making billions of dollars aren’t capable of doing basic analysis of scientific work, or hiring a team that can, which is why the best they’re capable of on the pandemic front, for example, is attaching a link to the CDC website on every post that mentions “Covid” or “vaccine.” I don't think we need to assign blame to YouTube here, but it's still the reality, and we should consider what it means for access to science. Maybe we (as a society) should in fact keep experimental science off YouTube. (I don't agree, but I can see an argument.) Even in that case, the decisions made here are disproportionate. The author starts the article by describing how he's banned from even logging in, not just uploading; he ends by saying how he has to worry about being locked out of his email. I agree with the author that we're in dangerous territory by giving companies unilateral control over this process, even if we do it for good reasons.
mmahemoff 5y ago
"Youtube has no realistic way to tell whether someone producing home-made science on youtube is a phd ex-nasa biohacker who follows best practices or just a complete quack who tries to sell dangerous fake remedies to vulnerable people." We shouldn't pretend someone with a significant following is banned or demonetized because The Algorithm Made Me Do It™. YouTube has the resources to verify if a popular streamer is a genuine PhD and formerly worked at NASA. Far smaller companies do these kinds of vefrifications all the time. It just chooses not to, even in the process of banning an account. Note I'm not arguing those credentials alone should mean very much. I just question in general, the argument that companies can't "realistically" take certain measures because it wouldn't scale. Most of the time, they don't take them because they're neither required to and it wouldn't improve their bottom line.
- watwut 5y ago
  Many quacks and grifters have PhD. Youtube would had to actually verify content.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    Also, isn't "having a PhD" and "used to work at NASA" the exact same credentialist approach he's arguing against?
  - concordDance 5y ago
    And can you imagine how hard that would be in cases like this? Imagine having to take a week reading up on bioengineering and experimenting to be able to moderate one video! The stats would look terrible! That said, I think only a very small proportion of videos would take that amount of verification, most could be dismissed far more easily.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
simorley 5y ago
This comment is so antithetical to the "spirit of the internet" and hacking in general that I'm in shock. > 77% of the Youtube audience in the US are 17-25 years old, it's not some niche forum for engineers and the notion that they can read scientific papers and weed out legitimate science created at home from misinformation is absurd. Only PhDs or engineers are allowed to be interested? You think only people with CS degrees should learn about programming/hacking? Only people with electric engineering degrees should learn about circuits? Also 17-25 is mostly adults. Also, wouldn't the people who watch his videos be self-selecting? I'm guessing 99% of the demographic you mentioned wouldn't be searching for his video. > The author has a company that sells genetic engineering kits to people and by banning him from Youtube that impacts him financially. Probably. But so what? > I personally think Biohacking and eccentric science is cool But people in the 17-25 year old demographics are not allowed to find it cool and enjoy it? Your argument is that it could be harmful and therefore everyone 17-25 should be barred from it. That's the argument I heard in the 90s to prevent young people from learning to code/hack/etc. I don't understand how the culture of censorship and patronizing paternalism snuck into the "hacking"/tech environment.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  >that I'm in shock You're in shock of the attitude that hackers should stay off mainstream commercial platforms and avoid pandering to a generic audience? You do realize why we're having this conversation on HN and not on Facebook right? The 2% of the young adults who are genuinely interested in science and tech and DIY maker culture will find him regardless where he is. That's how it always works when people actually care, it's a good filter. I'm not paternalistic, I'm opposed to grifters and attention-seeking. There has always been a barrier to entry in hacker culture because getting past it signals that you have some commitment and degree of willingness to learn, which is particularly important when we're talking about gene-editing yourself
  - simorley 5y ago
    > You're in shock of the attitude that hackers should stay off mainstream commercial platforms and avoid pandering to a generic audience? I'm in shock because you believe 17-25 year olds should be barred from knowledge. > You do realize why we're having this conversation on HN and not on Facebook right? You seem to have a sense of superiority. Is HN better than facebook? I'm not so sure. You aren't better than anyone because you post here. I'm certainly not better than anyone because I post here. Certainly wasn't given any test or provided any credentials to post here. > The 2% of the young adults who are genuinely interested in science and tech and DIY maker culture will find him regardless where he is. This argument is even more shocking. What about the percentage of people who might have become interested if they were exposed to it? Do you know how many people developed interest in something because they were introduced to it? There are millions of minorities/women/men who didn't go into computer science because they simply weren't introduced to it. > That's how it always works when people actually care, it's a good filter. Because the hackers ethos is to make knowledge as difficult and impossible to reach? > I'm not paternalistic, I'm opposed to grifters and attention-seeking. Why didn't you say so. Why did you write so much about "17-25 year olds", PhDs/engineers, niche forums, etc? Grifters and attention-seeking isn't my cup of tea either. But they don't deserved to be banned. Also is grifting and attention seeking to under-17s and over 25s okay? Your logic and thinking is what paternalists in the past did to women and minorities. It's why people prevented women and minorities from reading, writing and gaining knowledge because it would be too harmful to them. Nothing more anti-hacker than that.
max-ibel 5y ago
But yet, if Nile Red whips up something dangerous, that’s ok? I mean I see your point, but this kind of enforcement seems random or worse (take down is maybe effected by complaints of lobbyists- chemistry has maybe fewer of those) No disrespect to Nike Red/blue, that’s a great channel.

foerbert 5y ago

I didn't get the impression the author alleged YouTube had any obligation to let him broadcast his material. He even mentioned understanding why YouTube would be wary of his content, and mostly was unhappy that YouTube did not put some of their profits into being able to discriminate between home-made science and the quacks exploiting the vulnerable. But none of this article made me even think the author believed YouTube had some sort of obligation to host content they did not wish to. He just wasn't happy with the decision they made.

equality_1138 5y ago
Exactly. I read this as a much broader critique of the scientific community. As YouTube is seen as a mass media company, it's not hard to accept their content decisions. He didn't fight it. I also believe any company that markets themselves as tech industry should not be this cagey about their relationship to science. It's an ethical question not a legal one. Jumping to the legal aspect seems like a big misunderstanding of the piece. Also funny to question whether the guy is acting on financial incentives to promote his ideas. Of course he does.
- foerbert 5y ago
  I don't think the financial incentives question was so much a sincere question as it was bringing up a concern about other influences on his position. I think it's a valid one. Humans are really bad at fully separating and understanding our influences, never mind selectively ignoring some them. Given the perception of many YouTubers as being more 'pure' ideological advocates, I think it's reasonable to bring up. Now to be fair, most any YouTuber that's likely to be a topic of discussion has almost certainly moved far past the point of actually being that 'pure' ideological advocate.
  - equality_1138 5y ago
    The article mentions about selling kits, so it's pretty obvious that his videos would be at least partially motivated by commercial aspirations. Yes? I called the comment silly as it seemed to be saying "I not only disapprove of this entrepreneur's target market, he is also employing deceptive marketing tactics"
    - foerbert 5y ago
      I mean yes, but also no? And I think a lot of it depends on how much you want to take from the overall tone of the comment vs a particular statement in it. Not everybody is going to read the whole article. Not everybody is going to put 2 and 2 together while they're reading and reevaluate his previous statements with that new context. I think it's pertinent information when evaluating his statements and coming to a decision about how you feel these things should be handled. I'd say mentioning his financial interest is more akin to a pointed summary That said I don't think this was an attempt a deception, nor particularly deceptive given all the context. But still, it's relevant. Some people would give an explicit disclaimer, others not. I don't think this is clear cut enough to say one way is absolutely correct.

reginold 5y ago

Agreed - the lesson here is platforms like YouTube have a lot more control than most assume. An easy to use, censorship resistant, video host seems needed.

vippy 5y ago
That's an interesting, and entirely unrelated, takeaway given what Barrin92 wrote.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
They have precisely as much control as anyone familiar with US law and business practice should expect: total control. As for censorship, I'm sorry but I don't consider what even a corporation whose operation is on the scale of YT or FB does to be censorship.
- sneak 5y ago
  It's still censorship even if it's not the government. User A posts content. User B subscribes. Entity C decides that B is not allowed to read what A has to say. C is a censor.
  - analognoise 5y ago
    Are you a censor if you own the platform? You can't come into my print shop and print Nazi literature. Could you print it yourself? Sure. So I'm not preventing you from printing it - I'm preventing you from printing it on my equipment. I.E - No, that's not censorship.
    - kbenson 5y ago
      It is censorship, it's just that not all censorship is bad, and people should care more about the details than that the definition fits for a word they have knee-jerk reactions to.
      - 5y ago

mattnewton 5y ago

> Youtube has no realistic way to tell whether someone producing home-made science on youtube is a phd ex-nasa biohacker who follows best practices or just a complete quack who tries to sell dangerous fake remedies to vulnerable people. In practice the incentive to promote the latter probably far outweighs the former in number given the huge, generic audience on Youtube. I think that the author would agree with you here- but it’s still worth calling out as something that changes if we move from a centralized content production model like PBS to distributed with moderation like YouTube. I think that they get the “cause” wrong, attributing too much to the “cult” of mainstream science, when it seems like a logistics problem, but the effect is still that no one is able to do a deep dive on validating content. The best they can do is diagnose how far content seems to be from the mean.

azirbel 5y ago

What I got from the article was that system as a whole is consistently throwing roadblocks in the way of experimental/small-time science. The author focuses on YouTube, but also cites a government investigation as well as deplatforming by PayPal, Square, LinkedIn, Amazon, Facebook, and Patreon. These are private companies, with their own policies, but private companies are part of the system too. So I don't think the concerns are conflated. Regarding YouTube, I think the author would agree with you: > The problem is big tech companies making billions of dollars aren’t capable of doing basic analysis of scientific work, or hiring a team that can, which is why the best they’re capable of on the pandemic front, for example, is attaching a link to the CDC website on every post that mentions “Covid” or “vaccine.” I don't think we need to assign blame to YouTube here, but it's still the reality, and we should consider what it means for access to science. Maybe we (as a society) should in fact keep experimental science off YouTube. (I don't agree, but I can see an argument.) Even in that case, the decisions made here are disproportionate. The author starts the article by describing how he's banned from even logging in, not just uploading; he ends by saying how he has to worry about being locked out of his email. I agree with the author that we're in dangerous territory by giving companies unilateral control over this process, even if we do it for good reasons.

mmahemoff 5y ago

"Youtube has no realistic way to tell whether someone producing home-made science on youtube is a phd ex-nasa biohacker who follows best practices or just a complete quack who tries to sell dangerous fake remedies to vulnerable people." We shouldn't pretend someone with a significant following is banned or demonetized because The Algorithm Made Me Do It™. YouTube has the resources to verify if a popular streamer is a genuine PhD and formerly worked at NASA. Far smaller companies do these kinds of vefrifications all the time. It just chooses not to, even in the process of banning an account. Note I'm not arguing those credentials alone should mean very much. I just question in general, the argument that companies can't "realistically" take certain measures because it wouldn't scale. Most of the time, they don't take them because they're neither required to and it wouldn't improve their bottom line.

watwut 5y ago
Many quacks and grifters have PhD. Youtube would had to actually verify content.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  Also, isn't "having a PhD" and "used to work at NASA" the exact same credentialist approach he's arguing against?
- concordDance 5y ago
  And can you imagine how hard that would be in cases like this? Imagine having to take a week reading up on bioengineering and experimenting to be able to moderate one video! The stats would look terrible! That said, I think only a very small proportion of videos would take that amount of verification, most could be dismissed far more easily.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

simorley 5y ago

This comment is so antithetical to the "spirit of the internet" and hacking in general that I'm in shock. > 77% of the Youtube audience in the US are 17-25 years old, it's not some niche forum for engineers and the notion that they can read scientific papers and weed out legitimate science created at home from misinformation is absurd. Only PhDs or engineers are allowed to be interested? You think only people with CS degrees should learn about programming/hacking? Only people with electric engineering degrees should learn about circuits? Also 17-25 is mostly adults. Also, wouldn't the people who watch his videos be self-selecting? I'm guessing 99% of the demographic you mentioned wouldn't be searching for his video. > The author has a company that sells genetic engineering kits to people and by banning him from Youtube that impacts him financially. Probably. But so what? > I personally think Biohacking and eccentric science is cool But people in the 17-25 year old demographics are not allowed to find it cool and enjoy it? Your argument is that it could be harmful and therefore everyone 17-25 should be barred from it. That's the argument I heard in the 90s to prevent young people from learning to code/hack/etc. I don't understand how the culture of censorship and patronizing paternalism snuck into the "hacking"/tech environment.

Barrin92 5y ago
>that I'm in shock You're in shock of the attitude that hackers should stay off mainstream commercial platforms and avoid pandering to a generic audience? You do realize why we're having this conversation on HN and not on Facebook right? The 2% of the young adults who are genuinely interested in science and tech and DIY maker culture will find him regardless where he is. That's how it always works when people actually care, it's a good filter. I'm not paternalistic, I'm opposed to grifters and attention-seeking. There has always been a barrier to entry in hacker culture because getting past it signals that you have some commitment and degree of willingness to learn, which is particularly important when we're talking about gene-editing yourself
- simorley 5y ago
  > You're in shock of the attitude that hackers should stay off mainstream commercial platforms and avoid pandering to a generic audience? I'm in shock because you believe 17-25 year olds should be barred from knowledge. > You do realize why we're having this conversation on HN and not on Facebook right? You seem to have a sense of superiority. Is HN better than facebook? I'm not so sure. You aren't better than anyone because you post here. I'm certainly not better than anyone because I post here. Certainly wasn't given any test or provided any credentials to post here. > The 2% of the young adults who are genuinely interested in science and tech and DIY maker culture will find him regardless where he is. This argument is even more shocking. What about the percentage of people who might have become interested if they were exposed to it? Do you know how many people developed interest in something because they were introduced to it? There are millions of minorities/women/men who didn't go into computer science because they simply weren't introduced to it. > That's how it always works when people actually care, it's a good filter. Because the hackers ethos is to make knowledge as difficult and impossible to reach? > I'm not paternalistic, I'm opposed to grifters and attention-seeking. Why didn't you say so. Why did you write so much about "17-25 year olds", PhDs/engineers, niche forums, etc? Grifters and attention-seeking isn't my cup of tea either. But they don't deserved to be banned. Also is grifting and attention seeking to under-17s and over 25s okay? Your logic and thinking is what paternalists in the past did to women and minorities. It's why people prevented women and minorities from reading, writing and gaining knowledge because it would be too harmful to them. Nothing more anti-hacker than that.

max-ibel 5y ago

But yet, if Nile Red whips up something dangerous, that’s ok? I mean I see your point, but this kind of enforcement seems random or worse (take down is maybe effected by complaints of lobbyists- chemistry has maybe fewer of those) No disrespect to Nike Red/blue, that’s a great channel.