YouTube is trying to reward “quality” content

The reason is advertising money is what funds Youtube. Ultimately, this means Google has to make sure their videos are mostly "advertiser-friendly"[0]. This unavoidable editorial tension is what the prior boycott incident (Adpocalypse[1]) was all about.

>We badly need some new blood guiding tech development.

It's not just a new programming team with different ideals. You need a new funding model.

The obvious alternative is to create a video site that doesn't depend on advertisers. With no ad sponsorships as a revenue constraint, what options does that leave us?

(a) paid subscription or donation websites. But most viewers don't have money to pay for a youtube-clone with non-ad-friendly videos. Even if they did have discretionary income, they wouldn't pay for it anyway. (Example of users overwhelmingly preferring ads over paying an insignificant 8 cents per month.[2])

(b) volunteer self-funded decentralized video service like Peertube

Both those options have massive economic and technical disadvantages. Storing petabytes of videos is expensive and so far, nobody else has figured out a non-advertising model to pay for the hosting costs to serve them to millions.

Keep in mind that the other video websites that some people do pay for such as Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu, etc are also not bastions of free speech that allow extreme political views.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#Advertise...

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Adpocalypse+advertisers+boyc...

[2] https://www.tune.com/blog/mobile-ads-70-of-smartphone-owners...

Maybe we can unwind the dystopian internet by adding a little of the real world responsibility back onto corporations that have been running wild without any rules “because it’s the net”.

YouTube, Facebook, etc. that are all behaving as publishers but without the responsibility real world publishers have, are now facing that reality. It appears they are having to choose between taking on the responsibility of being a publisher, or to do away with that by become just a platform. At the moment they seem to be trying to hold onto their publisher behavior while doing as little as they can.

In response everyone cries fowl. Instead you should be arguing that YouTube must drop is publisher behavior and design aspects and reorganize around being a pure video hosting platform if that’s what you want. But not both.

What needs to happen is solid debate, constructivly listening and then disseminating and showing what they are wrong about and why, with proof.

As for platforms, deplatforming gives them PR, fuels their antidisestablishment mentalities and hands them the discrimination card (ironically) as a social form of crying to gain more people sat on the fence and drives them into hopping off on the wrong side. Be far better to listen, debate and handle, heck even if everybody just laughed and pointed - whilst unconstructive, it is far more constructive than the way it is currently handled.

But the whole rise of label and dismiss, has become a tool that many use to push their own extreme narratives and group-think mentalities without rationalising what they are actually doing.

Imagine if somebody said 2+2 is 5, you would point out what is wrong with that, why and show that it is 4. But society today seems to prefer to label and name call and ignore them without telling them how they are wrong and debating it so they learn. Hence it only fuels and angers those who believe the answer is 5, as they feel ignored, dismissed and in effect, bullied. Then the whole state of victimhood mentalities play out and the only thing debated is done in a confirmation-vacuum by both sides in isolation, giving rise to name calling etc. All rather sad and ugly.

It's not "ridiculous", it's table stakes. If you ever run an open community, you'll find that bad actors are inevitable.