To be clear, it doesn’t appear the content concerned is actually child porn. It is just young girls doing various things and then a lot of inappropriate comments by “fans”.
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They already can. There are moderation tools made available to all uploaders (delete comment, ban commenter, etc), and there’s a setting to only publish comments that you have approved of (creating a moderation queue for all comments):
All my modest proposal would do is change the defaults. The defaults as they exist today have made Youtube comments into a grim joke. Yes, my proposal has its downsides, but I don’t think those outweigh the benefit of draining the trolley cesspool that is the expected norm on youtube videos today.
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Yeah I’d be fine with nuking all YouTube comments forever. I’m not sure why, but that forum seems to be an even more toxic environment than Twitter.
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I like your idea.
One way to game it would be to d/l the video you’re ‘interested’ in and want to comment on, then re-upload it under your own name (or pseudo-name) and allow comments with ‘accept all’ checked. Then the arms race begins anew over who ‘owns’ a video, and how much it would need to be edited to create a new or unique video - such as appending a banner, or embedding it in a frame, or any of the zillion ways youtube users post nominally copyright works now.
Earliest date-time of upload seems like a decent place to start for ownership, not sure about the edited videos. Mind you, Google is full of smart people. I am more than confident they could figure it out, if properly motivated.
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Until you get into the “challenges” mentioned in the video. “Eat a popsicle in one bite challenge” “Do 30 leg lifts in 30 seconds challenge” I’m sure all the limits have been floated. Just spitballing here “ride your best friend like a horse challenge” it’s silly stuff that kids like to do anyway which makes it worse. The girls are being taken advantage of.
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The video also said that actual CP links were also being left in the comments.
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So shameless, right? Like, just a normal thing to do…
You surely understand that this kind of stuff is not okay (regardless of age) but do children? They may have a fleeting idea but maybe not knowing all-the-way-around why it’s messed up. So this kind of “treatment” normalizes creepiness. When it comes to normalizing, kids can be easily convinced of anything. This is why they need the greatest protection. You don’t think it’s a special case?
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Quite the understatement. Are you English, per chance?
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I think that making a distinction between children and adult is to normalize creepiness overall. Of course children are less likely to see an adult’s motivations.
But the question that needs to asked is whether or not something is harmful, dehumanizing or threatening, regardless of age. If the answer is yes, why tolerate it at all?
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This is a far more level-headed summary than the MattsWhatItIs video actually offers. I can absolutely understand feeling creeped-out by the timestamp-creeper phenomenon. The world just keeps finding new ways to disappoint, doesn’t it?
I haven’t watched the whole thing, but I think MattsWhatItIs is hyperbolic. Some of the stuff he says just isn’t true:
Once you enter into this wormhole, now there is no other content available … YouTube’s algorithm is glitching out to a point that nothing but these videos exist!
What he means is, the suggested videos sidebar fills up with more of the stuff that’s popular with the timestamp-creepers.
Well, of course it does - as he explains, he’s using a fresh YouTube account, so all YouTube knows about him at this point is that he’s watched several of the timestamp-creeper videos. They’re the bulk of his viewing history.
That’s not an algorithm “glitching out,” either, on the contrary it’s the sort of thing a recommendation system is supposed to do. It’s just reflecting the grossness of its own users here.
But the rest of YouTube doesn’t disappear. If this is the way you use YouTube, allowing it to lead you around by the nose / recommendations all the time, as if that’s the only UI it has, you’re always going to be at the mercy of these kinds of hidden webs of connections.
Who is MattsWhatItIs? All his posts seem to be related to this.
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Well, one thing to consider is that children are not considered to have their own agency, and are consequently considered the responsibility of others (their parents) as well as society as a whole to some degree.
To make a really bad comparison: If an adult male is making creepy sexual comments about myself, I, as an adult who is capable of defending myself, am likely just to make a snide or rude comment and walk away. You can imagine that my (and society as a whole) is going to look upon the situation a little differently if it’s an adult male making creepy sexual comments about my grade school daughter.
Yes, it would be nice to keep horrible people from being horrible to other adults, but it becomes the responsibility of parents and society to keep children protected.
A similar argument would be “why do hate crime laws exist?” If it’s illegal to do something bad to one adult, why is it worse if it’s done to someone who belongs to a “protected class” for discriminatory purposes?
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I know the rep YouTube comments have and indeed I’ve seen some dumb, abusive ones. But the comments I see in channels I subscribe to today are mostly polite, appreciative, and sometimes even (gasp) constructive.
Once I thought YouTube comments were hopeless. I don’t know what changed, but good YouTube comments exist.
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In this case, there are consequences for both circumstances, only they are harsher for “protected classes” as you put it. This is totally appropriate.
Allowing creeps to harass women (or any adult), and only punishing those targeting children is not the same thing.
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Plus it prevents the most obvious brigading and targeted harassment.
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Well - except the #1 earner on youtube is under 13.
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The problem is that the videos are re-uploaded by 3rd party adults and those are the ones ‘commented on’ - the examples (I admit I didn’t look myself) were all re-uploads. Why these aren’t flagged by google’s ‘copyright protection’ system is beyond me - duplicate videos should get flagged and shouldn’t be hard to identify by an algorithm…
However if you just disable comments and the ‘suggested’ - but still allow the vids to be uploaded (and timestamp links to be a thing) you just push these ‘lists’ to another ‘more hidden’ corner of the internet… which … is great I guess if you just don’t want to know this exists - but doesn’t solve the problem.
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This is not a solution to the problem, but just a way to make your own (and your children’s) youtube experience more relaxing and enjoyable. I’ve been using Distraction Free Youtube for a few weeks now (I think I first read about it on BB). It’s just really nice to watch videos and not have to see the annoying recommendations afterwards or any comments at all.
My kids use it too. This is not parental control. They can easily change the settings if they want, but they just like youtube a whole lot better without all the crap.
There’s also a chrome plugin, but really, you should be using firefox.
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Maybe it’s the sort of videos I like-- vintage gaming, science. “maker” stuff, photography, but I’ve found youtube comments to be interesting, informative, and collegial.
It’s highly variable.
Kerbal vids, space geekery, woodworking and metalworking stuff: mostly good comments.
OTOH, just about any military history vid will have comments packed with Nazis, and Australian history videos tend to be swamped in virulent racism against Indigenous Australians and/or non-white immigrants.
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