We’ll have to see how long this video remains available. Thunderf00t, the well-known godless anti-creationist creator of fine youtube videos, is routinely targeted by Christian/creationist scriptbots to downgrade his videos and even get them banned, and he’s had enough — this clip takes the youtube management to task for kowtowing to the ignorant god-crowd. It was, of course, deleted by the youtube management, but not before it got copied to many other places.
It’s actually rather sad to see. There have been a lot of shenanigans like this recently, and I’ve gone from regarding youtube as merely poorly managed to suspecting that they are actively evil.
Yes, but what does Christ have to say about all this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmlPaCaNeL0
But Youtube can’t be evil! It’s owned by Google!
For anyone that wants to download the video to put it on your own website or youtube channel(In case this one gets taken down)
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=4d77967b07dff9ac4012e8015643d9c840c71670e93b4d0b
Whilst I do agree with what he was saying, and I know it does happen (most viewed video on youtube, ‘girlfriend’ by Avril Lavigne, is up there because of viewbots, knocking ‘evolution of dance’ out of its rightly deserved place) I couldn’t stop thinking: “INTERNET – SERIOUS BUSINESS” during it.
I mean, did he HAVE to sound that moody and dramatic, could he?
Between this and all the false DMCA claims, it’s really hard to see how these guys can fool themselves into feeling like they have the moral high ground.
Isn’t it strange how hard they have to lie just to support the Truth?
I have heard too many instances of YouTube allowing preposterous claims from religious nutbags.
I say we (the internet community with at least a small sense of propriety) move our video home base to another site that does not display obeisant to the religious right.
YouTube would be left as the domain of adolescent females squealing and giggling and young males igniting their flatulence.
Re: Sam B(#4)
The question which you should be asking yourself is not whether this is a serious problem but whether the problem should be addressed by YouTube in accordance with their stated policy.
If YouTube wants to maintain that they are an open forum and support freedom of speech (with some stated limitations), they need to act the part if they wish to be taken seriously. As things stand now, in order to not appear as self-contradictory they must change their policy and overtly state that religious messages are permitted and atheist messages are not. By not taking any action, this is precisely what they are doing.
You can’t claim yourself as a fierce defender of the right to free speech and simultaneously lobby the government to shut up your neighbor because he’s saying things you don’t like. Likewise, you can’t be a government official who claims to be a fierce defender of the right to free speech and yet turn a blind eye to a constituent impugning his neighbor’s right.
You either support it, through and through, and are willing to do something to defend it or you are merely a hypocrite with questionable honesty. Right now, YouTube’s honesty is in question. Are they willing to do something about that or not?
Why do people, presented with the vastness of the internet, insist on using a single provider and then whine about the consequences? Stop using Youtube and use anpther provider that takes your concerns a bit more seriously.
Thank you for your help sir.
Re: Tony Sidaway(#8)
Because if no stand is taken, the tactic will prove as effective as it is intended to be, and it will spread.
Youtube used to be so simple. Now they went and got all complicated for some reason. Dunno why. Surely I’m not the only one who thinks so. Oh well…
What exactly is this fellow’s grievance? There is some vague accusation of inaction by Youtube on the grievances of a single user, and the only concrete evidence presented is that Youtube has in fact responded to a complaint.
To make my mind up, I need evidence. Some pretty pictures and well chosen words don’t do it for me. That’s what being a skeptic means.
What exactly is this fellow’s grievance? There is some vague accusation of inaction by Youtube on the grievances of a single user, and the only concrete evidence presented is that Youtube has in fact responded to a complaint.
Yeah really. Seems kinda long winded. “Users users users users users users…”
Well, the ignorant god-crowd are users too!
I also couldn’t figure out what the problem was, and after two minutes of hearing about Youtube’s financial interests I gave up. TL(winded);DW.
The comments there were pretty dumb, but again, this is Youtube so that is to be expected. Maybe there shouldn’t be comments allowed at videos like this? That tends to move the righteous whinger crowd along.
Thunderf00t’s grievance is that, for some time, creationists have been using botes to vote down videos and comments on his and numerous other pro-evolution channels. When you see 500 1-star ratings come in within a few seconds, you know it’s a bot.
Thunderf00t has been trying to complain to YouTube about this activity for some time. YouTube hasn’t responded, even to say “Yes, we are aware of the problem and are trying to put measures in place to stop bots”. In fact, the only time YouTube responded quickly was when their interests was threatened. So Thunderf00t posted this video asking for collective action – a simple “please send an email in support” request.
Nobody is asking for user activity to be restricted. But votebots isn’t counted as user activity, and is in fact in violation of the YouTube Terms of Service. All Thunderf00t was asking was for YouTube to enforce their policies. Well, it looks like they have – even though Thunderf00t did not, in fact, promote spamming. Ironically, this just strengthens Thunderf00t’s argument; once again, YouTube has acted quickly to protect their own interests.
My copy of the video is up at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlrRy5h7VDA.
In addition to the votebot problem, there has been an obnoxious problem of users filing false DMCA claims in order to censor those they dislike. Youtube has turned a blind eye to this.
Basically, Youtube hasn’t done anything to prevent assholes from abusing the system, and this is annoying.
Re: Tony Sidaway(#12)
He may not have made his case crystal clear, but his evidence is there. If you post a video and it gets removed due to the sheer number of false reports against it, that’s evidence of a concerted effort of censorship.
You seem to be of the opinion that it’s somehow difficult to detect botted accounts. It isn’t. They behave in ways which are outside the norm of human behavior – by design. It becomes abundantly clear when you’ve become the victim of bot voting when you post a video for only a few minutes, the bot army has already scraped the YouTube page and voted your entry down hundreds of times so that it will never show up, or flagged it as “inappropriate” though it’s well within the terms of service.
Imagine that this blog had user accounts and the capacity to vote comments up or down. I could easily write a program to spider the site, watch for comments by you, and log in to multiple accounts simultaneously to downvote your comment into oblivion (forcing it out of the public view). You’d know it, I’d know it and PZ would know it. If he chose to do nothing about it because he agreed with me doing it to you on some level, he’d be lying if he claimed that he supported your free speech rights equally to mine.
It’s not even hard from the side of the provider to identify bot armies and ban them, and they should be banned because they eat up bandwidth and database space. The fact that YouTube is doing nothing about it, even from a business perspective, is rather telling about their opinion on the matter: they condone it on some level.
To those who say “Lulz intertez is serious business”, no one’s suggesting a sit-in or a march. By simply favoriting, rating, and sharing the video you can help to raise consciousness.
Between thunderf00t and others like him, videos which promote critical thinking and show the falsehoods of creationism have gathered tens of thousands of views. With public opinion towards evolution being so alarming right now, the voices of thunderf00t and company are providing a valuable service.
The fact that these guys are getting attacked by bots and having their videos buried under bad ratings should alarm those who feel at all obligated to fight against irrationality. And what happens when Tf00t points this out to youtube? They shut him down.
Small responses from a lot of people can be very effective if we all participate. Watch the video, rate it, favorite it.
Why do people, presented with the vastness of the internet, insist on using a single provider and then whine about the consequences?
I have to agree. Treating “category killers” as if they were responsible for the very existence of the sector they dominate is ridiculous. In Youtube’s case, the sector itself is somewhat imaginary–once you’ve gotten past “OMG LOOK TEH MOVING PIKCHERS ON TEH INTERETS!!”, serving video over the Internet is really no different than serving any other large file. And that’s really all Youtube does–it’s just a file serving site with a mediocre social networking service tacked on.
I get particularly irritated when governments (or government services such as the BBC) seem to use Youtube exclusively as a means of disseminating material in the public interest–is it really the only company capable of serving large files for their purposes? They seem to be playing into the idea that serving video is somehow “magical”, and requiring some sort of specialized know-how to implement.
I barely had time to give the original a rating of 5 before YouTube yanked it. Boy, they sure are efficient! (When they want to be.)
Re: Jetterax(#19)
You’re completely ignoring the reason YouTube is so popular: It’s efficient.
Computers only recognize binary (compare to your “serving video is just serving large files” argument), when it comes down to it. I could put up a web site which required you to comment in that form (you may only use the 1 key, 0 key and the mouse to click “Post”). Would you ever use my web site to comment? Of course not, it’s highly inefficient. On the flip side, the easier and more efficient I make it for you to comment, the more you’re likely to use it. If I could enable you to just think your comment and submit it instantly using pure thought alone, I’d have all of the customers.
Would you then be asking “Why is everyone using that thought-based forum system over all the rest?”
Badly managed archive or actively kowtowing to the worse pressure groups? As Vernon Schryver once wrote:
“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”
Re: Irene Delse(#22)
One could also reverse that:
“Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence.”
Should we cease looking for ways to stop voting fraud for democratic elections because it appears that the people who are managing the election appear to be incompetent? Are you going to be willing to admit that it’s plausible that dead people really do get up from their graves or goldfish have learned English and left their bowls to vote in presidential elections? Really?
Hanlons Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
http://www.youtube.com/ is owned by Google
http://google.video.com/ is the one _run_ by Google. They’re merging, yet obviously different.
http://www.getmiro.com/ is a very nice alternative, I suggest the PBS/Nature channel and the TED Talks channel.
…and while the subject of why this matters has been covered, I just want to mention that Thunderf00t and CDK007 do a lot of excellent work to debunk Creationism/ID and support Evolution. CDK007 in particular has some lovely videos on evolution and abiogenesis mechanics that even grade schoolers can follow.
@ Ward
It isn’t a biconditional; what delse is suggesting is that incompetence looks like malice not the reverse. to reverse it would be affirming the consequent, more or less.
Ward @21:
Having spent enough time on internet forums such as Slashdot, digg, and YouTube, I can assure you that any system that requires the commenters to think before posting a comment will not attract any more than 10% of the users at most.
Ward S. Denker #23: I don’t see the point, but sure, reverse all you want — Schryver’s dictum is isotropic.
(And while you’re at it, feel free to attribute to complete unknowns, for rhetorical purposes, any wacko belief you care to name.)
It’s interesting to see how many people feel uncomfortable with the idea that maybe, there’s some evil somewhere in this benevolent Google empire whose products we use every day. Feels like being bitten by a puppy, perhaps.
BTW, if you like Hanlon’s razor, you may also be interested in this version, attributed to Heinlein:
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don’t rule out malice. (Or: but keep your eyes open.)”
It seems to me that the only way YouTube will do anything about bots is when it is in their own, financial interest.
So, we need someone like 4-chan’s Anonymous to set up their own “vote bots” to take down legitimate video posted by powerful users – movie trailers, music video etc. Then, when the ‘paying’ customers complain, YouTube will have to act and put a stop to bot accounts.
Could you imagine the outcry if Obama’s official channel got vote-botted!?! Bot accounts would be gone within a week.
I’ve already mirrored it myself. Everyone is welcome to rate it up so the masses can see the truth!!!
Or download and mirror it yourself!
Re: GBM(#26)
Ah, but it isn’t affirming the consequent. If I ran a successful conspiracy (one which is sufficiently advanced beyond all of the unsuccessful conspiracies), would I not be committing malice while making it appear to be incompetence?
This case is a little easier because it doesn’t fall victim to what normally brings down real conspiracies — the failure to keep it a secret (two people can only truly share a secret if one of them is dead). In this case, it’s probably one person controlling a lot of computing resources doing this. If I stuffed a ballot box with votes for one guy, it should be rather evident to the poll staff that I’m carrying a ton of extra ballots on me. It should be evident that there are more voting slips in the box than there were registered voters. If they ignore it, given all of that, they’re probably complicit in the act and not merely incompetent.
creationists have been using botes to vote down videos and comments on his and numerous other pro-evolution channels. When you see 500 1-star ratings come in within a few seconds, you know it’s a bot.
PZ uses a meat-‘botnet to cork polls. So what?
This stuff is all very new; it’ll continue to evolve. My guess is that eventually polls and user’s ratings will be accorded the credibility of banner ads for p8nis enlargement. Sites that allow complaints will adjust their practices as well. It’ll all sort itself out eventually, don’t worry.
Content will remain king. If you’ve got something worth saying, people will listen. That’s one trend that the entire Internet age hasn’t changed in the slightest, and I don’t expect it, either.
Ward@21
What are you talking about?! Your comment is always sent over the wire in binary (specifically, Unicode), and that is how it is received by the blogging site. You just never have to worry about that because all of that work is taken care of on your side of things by the OS and web browser software on your computer. One could of course do an end-run around those conveniences as you describe, but it would be pointless and not actually any simpler from the service provider’s perspective than the mundane way of commenting.
In the case of Youtube, almost all of the “magic” likewise happens on the viewer’s computer, in this case carried out by the ubiquitous embedded Flash video player that starts the download of the video file the instant one clicks the “Play” button. Youtube’s video server is not involved in this, it simply serves out an ordinary request to download a file. (This is the basis of the popular Firefox extension VideoDownloader, which detects the request the embedded player sends out and gives the user the choice to save the file to disk for later viewing.) The player itself is a simple Flash applet, and there are plenty of others, free and commercial, that do essentially the same thing off-the-shelf.
Serving video is just a matter of embedding the applet in a Web page, and pointing it to the location of the video file. All the party publishing the video needs is a fast file server with a very high-bandwidth connection–further special arrangements are not actually needed.
Marcus@32
The trouble is, bots are far more efficient and less time-consuming than PZ’s method.
If creationists (or whomever) had to manually log in to an account to post their one-star review it would still be possible for them to perform this trick – but they’d have to waste huge amounts of their time. :)
Marcus @32
what is the difference? I would think it VERY obvious to anyone with half a brain.
A “meat-bot” as you call it is me, you and thousands of others. A vote-bot is a bit of software being run by a single creotard forcing his/her narrow view of life on everyone else.
By comparison – do you understand the basic difference between a despotic dictator and a democracy???? Here is a hint – a dictator is ONE person, a democracy is run by all those meat-bots you hold in such low esteem. Move to Zimbabwe if you think “meat-bots” are so despicable.
Better still join the catlick church and have ratzinger’s vote-bot empire control your thoughts. Ratzinger speaks and thousands of meatbots start acting like zombie votebots.
I have sent my complaint to youtubes Suzie Reider (about 8 hours ago). I think that google’s claim to “do no evil” has just been thrown out. This is evil. Thunderf00t is awesome and his takedowns are classic – especially the “why people laugh at creationists” series. Maybe google (the parent company) need to kick the policy put in place by Suzie at youtube.
I agree with others on this site that maybe we need to set up another video serving site. Maybe atheists need to get together commercially and kick these godbot boot-kissers in their bank accounts where they kept all their balls.
By comparison – do you understand the basic difference between a despotic dictator and a democracy???? Here is a hint – a dictator is ONE person, a democracy is run by all those meat-bots you hold in such low esteem.
I understand that the difference is largely in your head.
But it’s ironic that you used democracy as an example of rightness. After all, democracy is “just” a clever way of engaging in conflict without violence – the underlying assumption is that “majority rules” because a large enough majority could kick the minority’s asses. Democracy breaks down quickly when it encounters asymmetric dictators – assuming there was any reality to it in the first place.
A “meat-bot” as you call it is me, you and thousands of others. A vote-bot is a bit of software being run by a single creotard forcing his/her narrow view of life on everyone else.
Sounds like someon took a deep swig of the naive with his breakfast. Haven’t you noticed that virtually every time PZ directs us minions to crash a poll, there’s someone who posts a “here’s how to clear the cookie so you can vote as many times as you like…”?
Better still join the catlick church and have ratzinger’s vote-bot empire control your thoughts.
Ooops, it wasn’t the naive you were drinking, was it? It was the stupid. WTF does being a cathotard have to do with anything I said?
If creationists (or whomever) had to manually log in to an account to post their one-star review
There’s a better – and far less palatable answer: if there’s a financial cost associated with having a login, then it’s very unlikely someone will pay for more than a few sockpuppets. (shrug) As long as votes cost nothing to cast, people will cast as many as they can figure out how to cast.
PS – manually log in? That’s just a stupid filter to weed out those who can’t code.
@37
“That’s just a stupid filter to weed out those who can’t code.”
We are talking about creationists.
I don’t see how a financial cost is “less palatable”. I’d be happy to pay a nominal fee for a personally useful or enjoyable service.
PS – I’m sure someone with your unique skill-set could fix the YouTube issue. :P
Re: Jetterax(#33)
Does your keyboard only have two keys on it (1 and 0)? You can communicate with a computer completely with just those two keys. That would be highly inconvenient to everyone.
You’re trying to boil it down to “just a flash applet and a high speed connection.” That ignores all of the technology which went into making that flash applet, the design of the network infrastructure which can support millions of simultaneous video viewers with nary a hiccup (a very efficient multicast technology), etc. That is not the equivalent of just putting a file out there and letting people link to it. YouTube does more with less, and they did it first, so they’re very popular.
I’m not the only one who’s mirrored it.
Thunderf00t has a part 2 up
I fell asleep halfway through. What did I miss?
@29
What part of “not your personal army” dont you people understand? Youtube is enourmous, DDoS would not work by horde, quite simply despite the 10s of thousands that could be called upon far from all are competent and those who wish to participate less so. Any other tactics are far too easily deleted, not to mention how we regulary use youtube its far too easy.
YouTube is for losers and malcontents. The average IQ of users must be around 65.
Serious people avoid that nonsense.
For mirroring purposes, download the HD-sized second part here.
NEB @44 that why Dawkins has his own channel? And TED? Hell even PZ has his own channel, though he rarely puts anything up on it.
People pop their pimples and zits on Youtube…nuff said.
Marcus @36
re differences between a dictator and democracy:
“I understand that the difference is largely in your head”
Thats a very novel slant on politics. I guess what, you don’t vote because you only end up with a politician? You should write down this concept and try to publish:
unelected dictator = elected leader
*head on keyboard*
“But it’s ironic that you used democracy as an example of rightness. After all, democracy is “just” a clever way of engaging in conflict without violence – the underlying assumption is that “majority rules” because a large enough majority could kick the minority’s asses. Democracy breaks down quickly when it encounters asymmetric dictators – assuming there was any reality to it in the first place”
The depths of your idiocy are showing. It is well known that a major problem with democracy is that 51% of the population can enforce their attitude on the remaining 49%. You may note we are talking percentages, as opposed to 1 dictator vs everyone else (minus minions, syncophants and those with vested interests). Bicameral democracies are an attempt to reduce this effect, so is a bill of rights, a constitution etc. Dictators just do what they want (including using violence and theft to silence any opposing voices).
“Asymmetric dictators” – bizarre to say the least. What, they limp? maybe they have suffered a stroke down one side? They wear their hat to the left? FAIL.
“there’s someone who posts a “here’s how to clear the cookie so you can vote as many times as you like…”?
a very different case. The above is still a manual, albeit a tedious task and up to each voter (and I do not do this myself). The polls are also unscientific newspaper or creotard sites. Serious votes (and scan back, there are a number of these) are always followed by a disclaimer that they are serious (eg voting for grant funding) and do count so should not be fraudulently flooded.
We are discussing having thunderf00t removed from youtube using fraudulent votebots driven by a SINGLE person (in this case with an IP out of Chicago). We are not some private army at PZ’s command. If I had some automated “idiot poll” alert software I would still be voting. Instead Phyrangula bloggers tell PZ about the polls they find themselves and he points readers to them.
Do you think PZ does class prep, marks papers AND scans all these regional media sites worldwide personally each night waiting to send his acolytes out to do his evil bidding? I feel it necessary at this point to retract my statement about “anyone with half a brain”. You clearly have significantly less. Can you tie your shoelaces unassisted?
“Better still join the catlick church and have ratzinger’s vote-bot empire control your thoughts.” (my quote)
“Ooops, it wasn’t the naive you were drinking, was it? It was the stupid. WTF does being a cathotard have to do with anything I said?” (your quote in response)
I am referring to the practice of priests going into church the Sunday before an election and instructing the congregation how the pope/cardinal wants them to vote. This is SOP. Who is being (deliberately?) naive now?
Are you trolling? Your arguments don’t really seem to be logical or rational and involve great slabs of stupid statements? Dumb statements like dictatorships and democracy are equivalent won’t be getting a response from me again.
Yeah.
E.V. @24 – Hanlons razor – I’d not heard of that. Thanks, that’s perfect! It explains the problem with 99% of the citizens of my county.
Obviously you’ve never watched any of Thunderf00t’s videos.
Thunderf00t has posted a follow up video.
It took You tube about 12 hours to pull the original. Please continue to support Thunderf00t and others against the vote bot abuse and the indifference shown by YouTube.
Youtube, after all, is no longer controlled by the individual users, but more by its business interests. It is, after all, now owned by Google’s commercial interests. As it functions as a business, why wouldn’t it be obeisant to the religious right? Right now, I am sure, its actions are mostly not to accommodate the users, but rather to accommodate its business interests and ties, and its business “public image.”
Therefore, I think that it is much wiser for people not to submit to the control of a single business interest, but rather to just host their own videos on their own websites, perhaps in .swf format if it is a short video. This is something anybody could do, since it would not be expensive at all, after all.
Peter McKellar writes:
You should write down this concept and try to publish:
unelected dictator = elected leader
Putin, Mobutu, Hussein, US electoral college, blah, blah, blah. Oh, sorry to inject real-world details into your ideology. Don’t you understand that polls, elections, etc. and the trapping of democracy are != democracy?
I am not interested in trying to research what percentage of “elections” are actually fair or represent a “real democratic process” but I don’t think you’re arguing from a tenable position.
The depths of your idiocy are showing. It is well known that a major problem with democracy is that 51% of the population can enforce their attitude on the remaining 49%. You may note we are talking percentages, as opposed to 1 dictator vs everyone else
I understand that. And, as you point out, there are lots of political tricks that are designed to prevent narrow splits. For exactly the reasons I described – the less close a race it is, the easier it is to determine which “side” would win if the pitchforks and torches came out – although you’re welcome to take the more comfortable viewpoint that it’s because people really actually care about being fair.
“Asymmetric dictators” – bizarre to say the least. What, they limp? maybe they have suffered a stroke down one side? They wear their hat to the left? FAIL.
Sorry. I was thinking ahead; eventually there will possibly be technologies for political control that allow a very small number of people to control a much more massive population. What do you think will happen, then?
I feel it necessary at this point to retract my statement about “anyone with half a brain”. You clearly have significantly less. Can you tie your shoelaces unassisted?
I generally wear slip-on shoes so that I don’t have to take the time to tie my shoes. :D
I am referring to the practice of priests going into church the Sunday before an election and instructing the congregation how the pope/cardinal wants them to vote. This is SOP. Who is being (deliberately?) naive now?
Gosh, I guess I was supposed to read your fucking mind over the Internet, huh?
“There have been a lot of shenanigans like this recently,” said the man who engages in poll crashing. It’s called karma, buddy.
Peter@36: A-yep, a-yep, a-yep.
#55
You’re silly. Equating poll crashing with votebotting is like comparing community organization vote drives with one guy going into a booth and voting 100 times.
Marcus @54
Putin – ex-KGB, not elected President (appointed) but was at next election (had advantage of being encumbent). Complex situation, but democratic. Much better than previous leaders (elected and USSR). Imho much better than the drunk yeltsin.
Mobutu – “On September 14, 1960, Mobutu took control in a CIA-sponsored coup” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobutu_Sese_Seko) – != democracy
Hussein (US puppet, I won’t even bother with references)
US electoral college – Hahahaha. Don’t even try to claim that this is democratic!!! The USA is a B grade democracy and mostly unchanged since its creation. No preferential voting system (first-passed-the post), electoral college is a joke and without compulsory voting it all depends on who turns up on the day. Massive disenfranchisement of the population (as seen by the Bushes in Florida when GW Bush was first elected). Prior to that, blacks were either slaves or not able to vote (as was the case with women in most countries). Rain on voting day is enough to cause a major shift in votes. You may as well claim that Ancient Greece, the inventors of democracy with a disenfranchised slave population nearly double the size of the free population was representative.
Britain is a constitutional democracy with the house of lords. Australia restricted voting to “landed” citizens originally, then all male citizens, women were added later and aboriginals much, much later.
There are few (if any) “true” democracies and gerrymandering, the “electorate system” with seats etc all skew this from a *real* democracy. Politics are an evolving system, more like a line with nations scattered all the way along. I never claimed it was perfect, just more representative than dictatorship. Some dictators can be reasonably beneficial, others more despotic. Some democracies can be pretty bad (witness the Howard years in Australia). As a general rule democracy offers more input from people than a dictator (or aristocracy) – and it offers the chance to vote out a government (assuming it allows anyone to run for office). Keeping populations ignorant or restricting candidates or voting rights is not democracy, though those countries will frequently claim that they are). I am not naive.
I guess both of us were assuming mind-reading skills re your asymmetric dictators and my catholic votebots.
I rarely wear lace-ups myself ;)
Phoenix Woman @56
Not sure of your meaning, but will blithely assume assent :)
My comment was actually @35 and Marcus responded @36 – 3 * “A-yep” would match with the 3 points challenged by Marcus.
I am curious if there have been any organized bot-attack reprisals against christian videos, or have none of us stooped to their level? (If anything, their videos are the ones that should be ‘inappropriate for minors’)
Peter@58:
Strictly speaking, Australian colonies restricted voting to citizens who met a certain property level, following the rule in England at the time. When the UK abolished the property requirement, the Australian colonies did as well – giving the vote to all male citizens.
The colonies of South Australia and Western Australia gave women the vote prior to Federation (in 1894 & 1895 respectively). When Australia federated in 1901, women had the vote from day one – the same rules are in place now as then: all citizens above 18 are permitted to vote, and required to at least show up at the voting booth (or submit electoral vote, or come up with a good excuse).
Strictly speaking, Aboriginals were not denied the vote (except in Queensland and Western Australia). However, due to racial prejudice, a lot of bureaucrats and politicians acted to block Aboriginal voting. The 1967 referendum, which took the power to make laws about Aboriginals away from the States and gave it to the Federal government, was as much a consciousness-raising exercise as anything else – very similar to the black voting movements in the US Deep South.
(See http://www.aec.gov.au/voting/indigenous_vote/aborigin.htm for more on that)
Badly managed is the least you could say. Sometimes I think their inconsistent behaviour is intentional, but then again why would it be? Anyway, I have started to simply download videos I think are great and I want to keep. No one can tell when they will be deleted for whatever reason. Videos violating copyright can be up for years, in other cases they are taken down almost at once. Sometimes videos are restricted for users in some countries only, another reason to quickly download whatever you want to be able to watch in the future.
In some cases, the Internet has lived up to and exceeded my expectations. In other cases I have been deeply disappointed by the development.
Robert @61
Many thanks for the detail and clarification. I’m Aussie too, but hadn’t realised much of the background – or that women could vote from day 1.
Agreed re the Aboriginal vote thing. For other readers: the way they did this (if my memory serves) was via a literacy test. As this population had very low reading skills at the time, they tended not to be able to vote – but the test was not given to whites although they may have been just as illiterate.
I believe that Menzies did similar to restrict the non-english speaking immigration rates also (back in post WWII era).
anon (#43)
Fail.
DrHorrible did not ask for Anonymous itself to get involved and did not even mention DDoS. Maybe once you get over yourself you could give that a second read and figure out the point DrHorrible was actually making.
I don’t see what conceivable harm a votebot could do to a video on Youtube. Doesn’t it just mean that it ends up with a low user-appreciation rating on some list? If I click on the URL, I still see the video.
Having said that, some of this guy’s videos are pretty good. I have just looked at “Fool4alifetime – is he bi-sexual?” and strongly recommend it for the clarity of reasoning with which he demolishes the argument from choice.
Mercurious @46:
That is why I said ‘average’. Do you understand what that word signifies? Did I say everyone? YouTube is populated mostly by fame seekers, low-lifes, racists, fashionistas and malcontents. It can not be taken seriously. Dawkins and TED and others use it as a depository.
This is unfortunate, but it appears the forces of creobot are quite active in trying to shut things down on YT. The Young Turks seem to have this problem too. They are constantly getting in trouble with YouTube over “copyright infringement” claims, and so their channel keeps going down. It’s practically a weekly affair.
It appears to me that YouTube either has a rather shoddy system in place that is weighted toward the mischievous malcontents being able to abuse it, or it has surprisingly parochial interests and a more “watchful” eye than users have heretofore come to expect.
Peter McKellar writes:
Putin – ex-KGB, not elected President (appointed) but was at next election (had advantage of being encumbent). Complex situation, but democratic.
Mobutu – “On September 14, 1960, Mobutu took control ..
Hussein (US puppet, I won’t even bother with references)
US electoral college – Hahahaha. Don’t even try to claim that this is democratic!!
Mobutu has since held “elections” :) Sort of like Putin’s. And the US’. Hussein held “elections” and did pretty darned well, if I recall. About as well as the Mubarak regime in Egypt, etc, etc.
Let me see if I can summarize the discussion a bit for clarity. I’m observing that ‘democracy’ is largely window-dressing and is more raped than honored. Your response is to offer the “no true scotsman” fallacy – i.e.: that none of the myriad examples in which fake “democracy” are shoved down people’s throats at gunpoint (or sneakier tricks) count because they aren’t true democracies. Is that about right?
This is way off topic, anyhow. So, to bring it back to youtube, etc – the observation I made is that in Internet polls and voting systems, since votes are “free” you can have as many of them as you want. (Arguably in a real democracy, “one person, one vote” works because it’s hard to create sockpuppets unless you register the dead in Chicago cemetaries…)
I’m not sure what about my original remarks pissed you off, to be honest. We members of PZ’s meat ‘botnet are (maybe) less sophisticated than a creo code-bot on youtube, but the underlying issue remains that democracy doesn’t work on the Internet any better than in real life – it’s just more obvious.
I’m damned if I can see a difference between saying “you can have all the sock puppets you’re willing to pay $20/year for” and the level of financial influence that has been achieved in US “democratic” politics. I favor obvious corruption over subtle corruption, personally.
(And, no, I am not trolling. Representation and fairness in representational systems is probably the crucial political question if we’re going to ever overcome dictatorship.)*
* – I consider the current system of nationalism to be birth-geography based economic slavery and dictatorship. But I recognize that I’m a bit ahead of the popular zeitgeist on that topic.
I know this will be an unpopular opinion, but YouTube is a privately-owned site that can run their site any way they want. No one has a right to post anything on YouTube. YouTube can choose to simply delete any atheist videos they want with no explanation whatsoever and there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do about it. It’s their site, their rules, so long as they’re not violating any federal anti-discrimination standards, they can do as they wish. Anyone not liking it can take their videos elsewhere, to another side that is more in line with their personal views. That’s why places like GodTube, etc. exist.
Freedom of speech, while a wonderful and important thing, simply doesn’t exist when you’re using someone else’s facilities to express yourself. You can make all the videos you want, no one is obligated to place them online, especially for free.
Thunderf00t is right, it’s all about the users and what percentage of Christian users do you think YouTube has, especially when compared to atheist users? Simple numbers, especially when you’re looking for advertising revenue, always wins.
Nobody said life was fair.
#65 Tony: Youtube searches function off of a videos popularity. A negative votebot campaign means that the affected videos will never show up in searches. Censorship via obscurity
#70 Cephus: YT is a private organization, but their lifeblood is advertising dollars, which is generated by user created content. The users have a say.
The users have a say only so far as YouTube is willing to listen. If YouTube thinks that Christians are a more important advertising segment, then atheists are shit outta luck. It’s a simple fact that there are more Christians, even more fundamentalist Christians, than there are atheists, I’m sure they see those as a more important segment of their audience.
Cephus #70
You’re right, Youtube has every right to be as hypocritical as they wish.
It amazes me how some people seems to think that, somehow, morals dont’t apply if there’s money involved.
Cephus:
A grocery store is also technically private property, but it kind of exists in a limbo between private and public since it caters to the public. A racist storeowner is not allowed to keep black people out (anymore) and a Xian storeowner is not allowed to shut out or remove an atheist. Despite being privately owned, they have taken on some of the responsibility of being public by the very nature of the business they are doing.
Private or not, the nature of what they are doing is very public, and they have made claims that they are very open, public, and endorse the free speech of one and all. Then they go ahead and turn a blind eye to actions that censor certain forms of speech and disenfranchise certain groups–when those very actions are violations of their own rules.
They have the right to do what they want if it’s private, but when they are being hypocritical to their own proclaimed values and applying their own rules in a remarkably selective way, the users have every right to complain as loud as they want.
I get tired of people who whine because a disenfranchised group is complaining about unequal treatment from a “private” organization. So they are allowed to be hypocrites and tyrants, but we are not allowed to criticize? You sound like one of those fundies who thinks “freedom of speech” means “freedom from other people’s speech” as well. Sure, you have freedom of religion and speech and all that, but there is no rule to ensure that everyone has to agree and that disagreement must remain silent.
And before you jump into the obvious, but poorly-though rebuttal to this, you’ll notice that no one here is promoting legislation to force Youtube to allow atheist videos–just that they are being smugly hypocritical to what they say they stand for. If their rules stated “Only Xian videos will be tolerated, and any videos posted that are critical of Xianity on any level will be pulled and the poster banned”, then that might be tyrannical and intolerant, but not hypocritical.
I hate these two-face sites proclaiming an adherence to free speech and then hiding behind “business” in order to censor things they don’t like under the table. Either the rules you stated apply to everyone, or you need to do some rewriting.
You wouldn’t be fooled if a grocer put up a sign that said “all races welcome” and then found “reasons” to have blacks or arabs or any race he arbitrarily disliked to be removed, or “reasons” to throw out any employment applications from black applicants. If every black guy who walked into that store ended up being accused of shoplifting and was taken out in handcuffs, or if the complaints of hundreds of local blacks could be turned by a single WASP who refuses to share the air with a “negro”, you’d start to figure out that that sign in the window is nothing more than a smily face to cover the truth, an attempt to have his cake and eat it too, an attempt to take all the prejudicial action he wants while still maintaining the outer appearance of “good guy”.
Private property, business, and all the other half-assed excuses in the world would never justify that guy. And they don’t justify Youtube. And those who are being screwed over have more of a right to complain than Youtube has to do what it’s been doing–or at least, letting someone else do their dirty work so they can pretend their not involved.
As for the voting thing, from what I hear Youtube knows perfectly well that this isn’t some “mandate from the viewers” that necessitates the silencing of atheists as a symptom of “good business”, but that it is one guy flooding the system in a way that actually violates their own rules. They are therefore complicit. They want to silence these views, and like the creationists, they are willing to do anything they have to do make it happen, no matter how underhanded or hypocritical.
If an atheist started botting Xian videos in the same manner, or if he set up a bot to vote the censored videos up and therefore neutralize the efforts of the Xian bots (supposing that can be done), I see no evidence that they would turn a blind eye. They’d block that right away, citing their own rules as justification–rules that they will continue to neglect in regard to the creationists.
Also, that fraudulent little “Dawkins stumped” thing keeps appearing in my recommended box. After I flagged it multiple times.
What’s next, Kincaid censored??
“I consider the current system of nationalism to be birth-geography based economic slavery and dictatorship. But I recognize that I’m a bit ahead of the popular zeitgeist on that topic.”
But you’re not alone! I’ve gotten several weird looks when I told almost exactly this to my ‘friends’. (Which was maybe a stupid move considering the growing nationalistic lynchmob-mentality ‘movement’ here :-/) Birthplace should be irrelevant as everyone can access information from wherever in the world. And these guys are beating innocent people up for some silly little contract signed in 1919 by now-dead people. (Which might be even understandable in some cases but what did GAYS have to do with Trianon?! C’mon.)
Eh, sorry for the off – I can get started on this…
#75: I already specifically said that so long as it doesn’t violate anti-discrimination laws, discriminating is perfectly legal. Both of the examples you gave did, indeed, violate anti-discrimination laws. You cannot discriminate on the basis of race, religion, creed, etc.
You may not like what they’re doing and that’s fine. You have a right to speak out against it all you like. You do not, however, have a right to use their facilities to do so. They have no obligation whatsoever to host any videos that they don’t want to host. It isn’t like you’re paying for the space, they’re providing it free of charge, specifically to attract advertising dollars. If they think, for whatever reason, that your videos are harming their potential revenue stream, kiss your videos goodbye.
You can call it hypocrisy all you want. I call it reality.
According to Google’s philosophy mob is right.
It worked superbly in their search engines and so they’re having a hard time digesting sometimes it can backfire.
I don’t like YT’s hypocrisy, or its patronising language. I say if we treat it like the monolithic, yet non-sentient, robotic system it is, by posting videoes over and over under its crummy censorship radar, it will learn. Victory to the intifada! Long live the resistance!
EV: Hanlons Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I hate Hanlon’s Razor. It is an imbecilic dictum. You have to analyze the situation in particular and not use dumb-ass proverbs to show your case. Malice and stupidity are often indistinguishable if you don’t bother to distinguish them. Any malice can be attributed to stupidity if you keep your data set small enough: the perpetrator almost never declares that “the bitch had it coming to her”
Otherwise, we could dispense with police services all together; even the most cretinous criminal tries to make the crime appear to be an accident.
There is no damn “default position” when you’re talking about human activity. If you don’t know — shut up. Otherwise, you need positive evidence in any direction you go. Show that X is incompetent or malicious or both.
Hmm. If someone was a real ass, just create some sort of machine some place, which each day creates 500 random accounts, then picks a random video and votes it down. Mind, even more effective would be a virus that did it, by infecting someone’s Windows machine and running, but that would be even more illegal. See how long it takes them to figure out they have a “problem”, when its random videos being targeted, not specific ones.
Oh, hell, who am I kidding. They should ****fracking**** know its a problem when specific ones are attacked anyway, and if they can’t figure that out, then nothing is likely to clue them in.
You’re trying to boil it down to “just a flash applet and a high speed connection.”
Correct.
That ignores all of the technology which went into making that flash applet,
The applet itself is a fairly trivial application of the Flash language, virtually all of the heavy lifting is done by the runtime library in Adobe’s plugin. As I noted, there’s plenty of applets that do the same thing; and note that some upcoming additions to the HTML specification make such fiddling somewhat superfluous.
the design of the network infrastructure which can support millions of simultaneous video viewers with nary a hiccup
While it’s not trivial, there is still nothing there at all specific to video.
(a very efficient multicast technology),
Does YT use multicast for ordinary videos?
That is not the equivalent of just putting a file out there and letting people link to it.
No, it’s the equivalent of just putting a file out there out there on a high-capacity server or mirrored distribution system and letting people link to it.
YouTube does more with less, and they did it first, so they’re very popular.
Yes, this is very true. Just what are we arguing about again?
Hi frog:
I was simply clarifying #21 & #22’s paraphrasing. I agree with you. It’s really just a reminder to examine the situation first before overreacting in day to day office politics/homelife, etc. When it rises to possible criminal mischief, it’s worthless.
I hate Hanlon’s Razor.
Seconded. It’s met the same sad fate as Godwin’s Law of late, getting invoked, in the vast majority of instances, in precisely those situations where doesn’t apply.
Oof, make that “where it doesn’t apply.”
Thanks, PZ for posting this video. The Thunderf00t account has been restored after lots of user action. Whether they do anything about vote bots and the like remains to be seen.
As others have observed, it is especially irritating to have Creationists pretending to take the moral high ground and then file false DMCA claims and use vote bots. If they think that Thunderf00t (or CDK007 or Potholer54 or whomever) is using faulty arguments/bad science, then they should respond with a video countering the arguments. But filing a false DMCA or flagging a video as inappropriate or using vote bots to give videos hundreds of 1-star ratings is hardly the moral high ground.
I’m quite pissed about the removal of the “show” link from hidden comments. It’s fine to allow people to save time by skipping what are probably dumb comments or to read them if they choose. It is not fine to allow gangs of sock-puppets and collaborators to silence people.