The Crime of Curiosity

I don't understand this social platforms.

Covid stuff and fake news aside, I reported maybe 20 times obvious scam videos, or posts with extreme hatred and threats of violence against a group of people and similar stuff where 99.99999% of us would agree that it should be removed without question, and only once they did remove it. All the other times I get a message that they reviewed my complaint, that it does not go against their standards/tos/bla bla, and that I can block the video/post/channel for myself.

And taking into account how many random stuff they ban proactively, it just does not compute in my logic board in the brain.

> A day after YouTube took down my video, I received an email. They banned me for life. This is not only to say I could no longer upload content. I could no longer even login.

We are, sadly, long since past the time that cloud providers, free content hosting, YouTube, etc, has to be considered hostile to anything outside the tech industry's consensus of what's allowed (as interpreted by their algorithms, which they like to pretend are fancy, but seem only barely smarter than keyword matching, except when they're rather dumber). Of course, due to Scale(TM), you can't actually have any humans in the loop. Unless, of course, you're well enough connected to get a bit of a rise on a tech news site, at which point a human will (usually) step in, mutter something about a mistake, fix the problem (the actual problem being the bad PR created), and go on their way.

If you're posting funny reaction videos to nonsense content, sure, use YouTube. For anything serious, this is no longer a good idea (well, if you're outside the tech industry consensus for whatever that is today).

But if you are even the slightest bit outside the mainstream, you probably shouldn't be using YouTube, or even the various cloud based hosting services. Your own server, in a local datacenter, perhaps fronted by CloudFront, is closer to the right answer anymore.

In the rush to free services, we've handed far, far too much power to a very small set of companies, who are now happy to use that power to turn the internet into only what they want to hear.

Most things are badly done. Most social media companies are not doing moderation well. Fitting the general pattern of most things are garbage. But some things are not! Find them and treasure them.

That's certainly the future.

Mass vaccination might have made it better for costs on tptb in the past. But, if that doesn't work because a sufficient amount of the population refuses to cooperate...