Item — HN Reader

We've seen a massive movement for companies to post warnings or alerts stating facts might not back up certain content on social media in the last year or so. Fact Checkers they're called.

Can we at least get youtube to put up a banner saying "no it's impossible to defy the laws of physics and build a unlimited energy machine with a few magnets a microwave and a multimeter?"

5 comments

The problem is that, in my experience, the most nefarious of these disinformation videos are those who are the most plausible and skirt reality enough to be complicated to debunk in a simple sentence.

If you seriously believe that the Earth is flat or that lizard people control the world, then frankly a Youtube disclaimer won't really change anything.

But take this random video I found earlier on PeerTube: https://peer.tube/videos/watch/7b5faff9-1752-4eba-be37-beeb0...

It's in French but basically it's one of these videos against the banking system that simplify and caricature the situation to the point of meaninglessness. Coming up with a proper fact-check for something like that would be incredibly difficult, and I'm sure extremely controversial.

It would also take a lot of time and money to get economists and physicists to weigh in on these videos. That's how these conspiracy theories manage to remain relevant in the first place: overwhelm the opposition with thousands upon thousands of hours of content, and claim that they take things out of context or that they don't get it if they don't bother to sink months of their lives watching all that garbage.

That's something I have noticed as well and it's concerning - the vast amount of fringe/conspiracy/right wing content that's showing up on things like Peertube. it's like the unhinged days of Usenet again in many ways.

Edit: And I've noticed the downvotes, yet what I have said is still accurate. It is true that Gab moved to mastodon, for example, and there is evidence of their mindset spreading to other properties in the Fediverse.

If you have something that's "just like youtube, but we don't delete your stuff" it shouldn't be surprising that the vast amount of content is stuff that was deleted from youtube

I think this effect becomes a strategic defensive moat for established social media websites. Anybody who tries to compete with established players will find that their earliest adopters are the most unsavory sort, banned by other sites looking for a new home. This is the more insidious side of 'network effects.'

This was exactly my point and I am disappointed to see that I was downvoted for saying so. I am still surprised at just how swiftly Gab, for example, spread into the Fediverse.

Some of the early adopters are definitely unsavory, yet that content is what new users are going to see. Peertube/etc are still too small to protect against it, I fear.

Founding cohorts matter.

Early online worlds were (often, not always), academics and techies. Even that was often hard going to generate larger appeal. Facebook was Literally Harvard.

Random malcontents have an even higher social hill to climb.

An elite founding cohort tends to regress to the mean. An unsavory cohort ... tends to further radicalise or collapse entirely.

Fandom/hobby groups are more sustainable and often avoid pathological evolution, but rarely seem to develop mass appeal.

And all this before adding financial or business pressures.

These services benefit from offering the viewer what they want.

I'm very cynical about any attempts to curb this. I suspect these services will go for stuff that they know, through A/B testing and whatnot, won't affect their bottom line.

Let's say they show particularly harmful and scientifically 'banana-shit' videos, but with a disclaimer in a sidebar that the content in question is 'disputed'.

I imagine viewers are much more drawn to the content and will filter out the sidebar because 1) they don't notice, 2) they don't care because it's just a sidebar, or at worst 3) the libs are trying to make us be okay with homos/feminist/etc.

A provider of said content could defend their 'wokeness', a consumer could just ignore the sidebar or use it to point out how 'the libs' control things.

Meanwhile the rest of us, if we get past the partisanship, are left wondering how such few actors got to decide on so many societally-relevant topics. Surely we've progressed beyond having to deal with feudal lords?

I'm with you, except I kind of love those videos. The plywood fabri-cobbled infinite energy pendulum that will be generating boundless power "just as soon as I get the friction down" always looks so cool! The enviable commitment to craftsmanship of the backyard free energy crank ends up producing beautiful, relatable work.

"As soon as I get the friction down" is such a funny excuse because it's almost correct. They're so tantalizingly close to getting it.

You found anyone who actually believed in it and weren't just trying to scam someone?

I always though these were prank/scam videos?

It might be inadvertent scam but a lot of these people passionately believe in their ideas. A lot of the time they’re not selling anything and it couldnt be categorized as scam. It’s wishful thinking for all I care

some really seem like true believers. I'm trying to find the one I'm thinking of because you're right: the search results are overwhelmingly people trying to get you off the site. The casual enthusiast having fun tinkering in the garage is fine by me; it's keeping them out of trouble and a better hobby than, say, boating. But like you I abhor the ruthless exploiter selling you a dream because having to work for a living is garbage. Whether that's the drop shipping get rich quick person, or the "buy my zero point generator" guy.

> and a better hobby than, say, boating.

LOL, as a boat owner that hasn't been out on my boat in quite a few hears, I wholeheartedly agree. On a side note, the payment's due again...

Sorry, I have to disappoint. I know at least one person IRL who believes a number of pretty weird things. Know him since school. Almost freaked me out when he told me he builds a cloudbuster for his backyard to protect against chemtrails.

A coworker of mine, and otherwise an incredibly smart and skilled developer, bought one of these believing it was real :(

There's something to be said for the average person being ideologically incoherent from my perspective, for the same reason I probably seem likewise ideologically incoherent to them!

There's a tonne of people that genuinely buy in to this stuff.

All you need is some vague sense that all the "experts" are either dumber than you, or part of some big conspiracy.

Then because of that you don't even try to understand the work of those that came before you and hey presto! You're on your way to slowly rediscovering the laws of thermodynamics on your own - and until you do (if you ever do) you'll believe all sorts of wacky shit might be possible.

Seeing how inaccurate other aspects of youtube moderation are, I puzzled why anybody would want youtube to attempt this. It would inevitably end up flagging videos of kittens when their shitty autocaption system thinks "purr" means "zero point energy".

That sounds like a lot of work. Can scanning software really do that effectively and fairly without a lot of false positives? Suppose for example you post a video debunking wacky anti-gravity claims, and the AI flags it because of keywords. You'll need to appeal, waste a lot of time, and maybe eventually it'll get straightened out, but the friction will be a disincentive to even produce your content at all.