It's really depressing that YouTube remains so bad at content moderation and general safety. You can search for stuff that will kill you and find lots of videos without disclaimers, but a "please don't do this" video gets banned once it starts competing with the highly profitable Cool Hacks videos
I'm convinced the many highly-ranked Cool Hacks channels abuse the content reporting system to remove any videos that will get in the way of their adsense cash, especially ones that tell you not to try their Cool Hack. Spamming abuse reports is common on any platform and even if Youtube were to review every reported video manually (which they don't have time or resources for), the video would still be down for ages for being "under review". If it comes back up, the reporters would just try another category and the cycle repeats. You can't ignore mass-reported videos until review either.
I think this is a design flaw in the whole concept of social media and the only solution seems to be to seriously cut down on the amount of content being uploaded. Not exactly a profitable or popular idea, but there's no feasible way to do any useful content moderation for this many users without employing a small province or country just to review reports.
The same adsense slice would still go to popular content creators, even if they were rate limited. But such a system would have to be mandated "from above" somehow, or upstart "Youtube Competitor" would just outcompete Youtube if Youtube unilaterally would impose such a rate limit.
Maybe it's old fashioned of me, but I think viewers are responsible for their actions. YouTube is such a wonderful resource, and it seems terrible to judge it on this basis. It's like judging a library that happens to have chemistry books that kids misused to hurt themselves. The problem isn't the library, or the book.
(Note: its different with political/emotional content. That stuff is more like a virus.)
By all means, I agree that everyone should be responsible for their actions. It is by this same principle that I believe that YouTube should be responsible for what they publish. The "the problem isn't the library" argument falls short if the library is actively banning books that offer information on the hazards and risks of the "how to manufacture large amounts of chlorine gas using just kitchen appliances" books they happily put on the shelves.
I don't know how old fashioned that is. Before the web, you didn't stumble upon this kind of content, and it was certainly not promoted to the top of anyones feed.
