<story><title>YouTube Is Removing Some Nootropics Channels</title><url>https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kgpk5/youtube-is-removing-nootropics-channels</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joew42k</author><text>Youtube is a private company and can do whatever they want with their own website. Nobody&amp;#x27;s stopping makers of these videos from hosting the videos themselves.&lt;p&gt;This is not censorship in the way we have traditionally understood. It only feels like it because Youtube is where the biggest audience is. It&amp;#x27;s the same whenever Facebook penalizes a post in the timeline, or whenever Google hides content from the search results. They feel like a the phone company or the post office - neutral platforms where people expect the right to free speech. In reality, they are publishers that exercise editorial discretion.&lt;p&gt;If we had focused on building decentralized platforms with interoperability and open standards, this wouldn&amp;#x27;t be an issue. Instead, you all wanted to make money. (Understandable)&lt;p&gt;My proposal - the government should recognize that network effects produce defacto monopolies, and use existing anti-trust law to break up these behemoth platforms, or force regulation on them.&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, I&amp;#x27;ll shout &amp;quot;i told you so&amp;quot; from my lonely, facebookless, linux-powered compound.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JackCh</author><text>The &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;my preferred definition of censorship specifies that it can only be done by governments, and [company] is not a government&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt; rhetoric that always appears with these sort of stories is truly tiring and pedantic.  Nobody here thinks that youtube is a government.  The problem isn&amp;#x27;t people thinking that youtube is a government; the problem is people thinking that censorship is something only a government can do, or thinking that because censorship is legal (when done by corporations) people shouldn&amp;#x27;t complain when it happens.  Many things that are legal are worth complaining about.&lt;p&gt;With regard to the rest of your comment, I&amp;#x27;m not confident breaking up the google &amp;#x27;monopoly&amp;#x27; would actually solve this problem.  If you spun youtube off as its own company distinct from the rest of google, wouldn&amp;#x27;t it still have a virtual monopoly on this user-uploaded online video space?  How would you actually solve that?  Split youtube itself into several &amp;quot;Baby Youtubes&amp;quot;?  How would that work, which one would get the domain name?</text></comment>
<story><title>YouTube Is Removing Some Nootropics Channels</title><url>https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kgpk5/youtube-is-removing-nootropics-channels</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joew42k</author><text>Youtube is a private company and can do whatever they want with their own website. Nobody&amp;#x27;s stopping makers of these videos from hosting the videos themselves.&lt;p&gt;This is not censorship in the way we have traditionally understood. It only feels like it because Youtube is where the biggest audience is. It&amp;#x27;s the same whenever Facebook penalizes a post in the timeline, or whenever Google hides content from the search results. They feel like a the phone company or the post office - neutral platforms where people expect the right to free speech. In reality, they are publishers that exercise editorial discretion.&lt;p&gt;If we had focused on building decentralized platforms with interoperability and open standards, this wouldn&amp;#x27;t be an issue. Instead, you all wanted to make money. (Understandable)&lt;p&gt;My proposal - the government should recognize that network effects produce defacto monopolies, and use existing anti-trust law to break up these behemoth platforms, or force regulation on them.&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, I&amp;#x27;ll shout &amp;quot;i told you so&amp;quot; from my lonely, facebookless, linux-powered compound.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amelius</author><text>&amp;gt; Youtube is a private company and can do whatever they want with their own website.&lt;p&gt;A big chunk of our culture is hosted by that company. Not sure if that makes a difference, but imho, it should.</text></comment>