YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

A real name policy also wouldn't actually address the actual problem. Toxic behavior is possible because on the internet you can write angry comments to a person on the other side of the globe and then forget about that person tomorrow. If that person does come back tomorrow then it doesn't matter if they are called "hahaurmom" or "Jonathan Willis".

While banning accounts that post multiple comments with questionable timestamps may be a somewhat reasonable way to proceed, just banning people based on the pattern of viewing they exhibit will lead to an unacceptably-large percentage of false positives. Just think back how many times you're feed got filled up with videos of a certain topic because youtube misclassified you somehow. The issue is further exasperated when the same account is used by multiple people (a family computer in some living room, an adults phone used as a pacifier, and other situations in which viewing patterns get muddled).

Just permanently banning people on patterns alone is a very bad idea.

>(hard to enforce, but at least they can hold that in their pocket if one of these creeps shows up on their radar again), and then forwarding their information to law enforcement. Lots, or almost all probably, of those accounts can be linked to a real person (either by the username or their IP). If police knock on some doors a lot of these guys are going to be too stupid to lawyer up and will probably confess to much worse things or agree to hand their laptop over for inspection after a couple of questions.

The thing is, what they're doing, while sickening, is not illegal. I strongly doubt law enforcement would be interested in getting flooded with reports of non-crimes that have a high false positive rate. I also doubt people will take kindly to being misreported to the police.

I personally believe that the issue of people creeping off videos can't be addressed without causing unacceptable (and sometimes significant) collateral damage to others. I think the damage done from banning comments on videos of children will far outweigh the damage caused by those comments themselves.

People should evaluate this issue rationally and not overreact.

First time I’ve actually seen "[sic]" being used

disillusioned is taking the position of The Internet. If we allow these things, things will just continue to get worse and worse. Standards exist for a reason, Gresham's Law, and the rest of it. (Including some wonderful pleas for civility and kindness that I completely agree with)

raxxorrax is taking the position of The Human Species. We have survived and evolved because we are a wild, aggressive, curious species. Whatever boundaries there are, we will push them as hard as we can. Life will find a way.

Both of you folks are correct. This is the crux of the problem with technologies like YouTube (or books, for that matter). If YouTube is a publisher, then it has an opinion, a political position, standards for what it thinks is civil, and so forth. That's great, but there's no freaking way in hell I'm going to agree to having a handful of companies decide that kind of thing for the entire planet. The idea alone is insane. I just read yesterday about people getting warnings from Twitter from things they posted 5, 6 years ago that somebody in a dictatorship found offensive last week. It's ludicrous.

If, however, they're a public forum, then they should just shut up and stop looking at the things that appear on their site. The public forum -- books -- require chaos, disorder, and evolutionary pressure. Can't fight mother nature. Life will evolve.

But they can't do that, can they? Because they're monetizing all of that content. So they have to keep close track of each little piece of everything.

Now they're stuck.

They want to have it both ways, and we feeble-minded folks watching this spectacle end up choosing one or the other. It's a sucker's game, and no matter which side we choose, it doesn't work. That's because the premise is broken. BigTech wants to be two things at the same time. Picking one of those things and arguing with folks who pick the other one just plays into their schtick and keeps the gravy train rolling along.

In my experience the community changes as a whole, but not the individual actors. Once a community tips the member base changes. People displeased with the behavior leave and people attracted to it join.