It’s worth noting that William Osman stopped producing videos on his YouTube channel due to the fallout of this video.
It was a long time coming because he comes off as very aloof and has received criticism about the safety of many other projects, but this one appears to have triggered a lot of outrage.
FWIW, I think we need more young, brilliant minds sharing this kind of content. It has the entertainment value needed to capture the interest of young viewers who may not be otherwise interested in engineering disciplines. There are many, many other channels out there (backyard scientist, action lab, Cody’s lab, stuff made here, etc.) who are very successful on YouTube, but they tend to cater to viewers who are deliberately choosing to watch their videos.
Was it really the fallout from this video? William got hit by the same thing most other good Youtubers like him struggle with: Burnout. Youtube and the algorithm want you to put out content every day, and will penalize you, and literally give you less money if you don't. This sucks for the "science" youtubers because their videos are projects that often require months of work and sometimes don't pan out.
NileRed, and close friend of William Osman's, has also significantly reduced his output, because it's absurd. Google wants you to kill yourself putting out as much content as possible, and doesn't care if you have to reduce quality or literally die as a result. If you quit, someone new will take your place.
This sounds like an opportunity for multiple long-form video producers to join under a single co-op owned channel. The channel can meter out a video a day or so, from a group of several dozen contributors, each one getting a share of the profits based on individual video popularity.
That's clever, but I would be hesitant to join such a co-op because you also share strike count with the others, and if another creator gets your channel banned for wondering about the lab leak theory (back when that was still verboten) you are screwed.
Also I would make sure it's not against the terms of service somehow.
Where the creators themselves have strong say in the platform policies and the recommendations system is much simpler and more transparent. Money comes from subscribers, not ads. (sponsor segments seem to still be allowed)
Though the risk of the channel being the victim of a Google ban-hammer goes up given more contributors. Assuming some incident in which Google's response is warranted, they won't care if told that it was one "bad apple". Chances are they'll hit the channel (and in typical megacorp automated governance mode, not hit that "bad apple" user/contributor).
If Google were smart, they'd see this as an opportunity to "do better" and facilitate these kind of co-ops, with appropriate technical, financial and governance support.
You mean likea Patreon or an OnlyFans? I think this is what OF was originally intended for, and they were kind of caught by surprise that adult performers flocked to the site.
You wouldn't actually prefer if Google kept new creators from getting views just to benefit old creators who aren't producing as much content, would you?
> Google wants you to kill yourself putting out as much content as possible, and doesn't care if you have to reduce quality or literally die as a result.
No, Google does not want you to "literally die". They aren't taking anything away from old YouTubers by letting users watch content from new YouTubers.
YouTube is an increasingly crowded content and more and more creators are vying for views and advertising dollars. You're ascribing a lot of malice to Google, but you're literally just describing market competition.
The alternative (keeping new content creators locked out so old content creators could continue to profit more) is obviously not viable.
Because it's a systematic force affecting any and all content creators on YouTube.
Both the first person, and the person replacing them, would be under the same pressures.
The incentive is for frequently released bites low effort content at the expense of high quality content.
>You're ascribing a lot of malice to Google, but you're literally just describing market competition.
Sometimes the product of market competition is a race to the bottom, which is great if we're talking solar panels, but less so if we're talking viability of a job and quality of a work product.
I think the more charitable way of understanding the person you are responding to is that ought to be ways of rendering the model sustainable even for those not interested in racing to the bottom.
Google is constantly in the process of restructuring the contours of the experience, the relationship between the audience and the creators, and we're calling everything that happens within those strictures "the market" even though they're a product of Google's discretion.
> Because it's a systematic force affecting any and all content creators on YouTube.
It’s a systematic force for creators across all platforms, with or without YouTube. People make content on the internet and compete for attention. Google didn’t invent market competition.
It doesn’t make sense for you to blame Google for new creators making new videos.
> Both the first person, and the person replacing them, would be under the same pressures.
To compete for viewers? Again, how is this Google’s fault?
I have no idea what you actually expect Google to do.
Limit new creators so the old creators don’t feel competitive pressure?
Hide content from new creators so old creators don’t have to compete with it?
I think you’re angry at the fact that competition exists in the free market, but you’re laying the blame at Google’s feet instead.
Popularity and quality do not necessarily equate either, but I think there are many people not competing in this arena that would boost the overall quality. I remember the old commercials on TV about Slim Whitman claiming to have sold more albums than Elvis and The Beatles combined. Can anyone here name more than one song, if that, from Slim Whitman? I am in my late 50s and when I take a glance at the most popular Tik Tok or Instagram or YouTube accounts, it makes me think that a culture with lots of time and luxuries on its hands produces mainly garbage watched by people with seemingly nothing better to do, a lot of narcissism; I get guilty reading HN more than 20 min. per day, but I find the discussions thought-provoking, and having programmed since 1978 on a Commodore PET 2001, among familiar folks and subjects.
I don't think that's what's happening, I think these quality niche creators are just flooded out by the views from videos that get much wider audience adoption. Stuff like "Win/Fail Compilation 246" that gest 10mil views with a new release every day is more profitable for YouTube to show than a science video that gets 1m views with a release once a month, which is high for a science video.
It is not necessarily a bad thing, cause good and bad are metrics determined by different people's relative preferences. But I would say it would be nicer if there was more even spread in recommendations between the stars and the people who put out quality videos every so often but don't dedicate their life to being a superstar, rather than a heavily-lopsided. The original spirit was supposed to be "You"Tube, and now it is more like SuperStarTube.
(But I don't want to come across as hating YouTube...I can accept it for what it has become and get my enjoyment out of it and I enjoy the benefit from people stumbling across my videos. I just want to present a different perspective.)
I guess there's always a trade-off and fine balance between suggesting older good quality videos vs giving chance to the new ones. YT algorithm is probably skewed towards quantity than quality.. that means often favoring someone who releases more frequently with decent quality compared to someone releasing great videos at a far less frequency.
> Youtube and the algorithm want you to put out content every day
I follow a bunch of YouTubers who put stuff out less than weekly, and make a decent (in some cases huge) living off it. Their content is a bit niche, has zero outrage value, and is incredibly well produced.
Maybe I’m just in a very different part of YouTube but I can’t even think of anyone who posts content daily.
I was going to mention this: on 2019 I started a niche channel, through some good timed posts on reddit I gathered traction, and then my own interest in the channel waned. I still have ~400 subscribers (it stayed at about the all-time high level) and the channel is still gathering about 100 views a month on content that is 2-years old for the newest.
I'm not sure "The Algorithm" is really such a beast as it's portrayed, and some of these takes seem like reductionist views on something that is complex to understand. Two other important metrics that YT checks on videos are watch time and watch %. If those are high, they know the content is good for recommending, even if it's sporadic.
And yes, I also follow channels who post content on a per-week/fortnight/monthly basis and they do fine.
> Youtube and the algorithm want you to put out content every day, and will penalize you, and literally give you less money if you don't.
I am not familiar with Youtube's payment system. Are you saying they do something like reduce the $ per ad / per view you receive based on the age of the video?
I think your best videos don't get recommended in the sidebar of other videos as much, unless you prove to Youtube that you can keep your subscribers coming back to your content daily.
I think its why you see the Trend in higher quality creators, of cutting out snippets of their longer videos and posting those clips daily. That way they can achieve the frequency without needing to put out brand new content every day.
That's why a lot of project based channels lean more on sponsorships, patreon and youtube members for a regular income.
For example, thought emporium (my favourite science youtuber) puts out videos very rarely but they're always big innovative projects and he makes enough to have bought a new lab recently.
I'm not surprised most tech youtubers don't suffer with burnout with the amount of work and manual labour that needs to go into your standard NileRed, Stuff Made Here, mark Rober, Simon, Giertz, etc. video compared to the rest of youtube.
And that's even before you consider that his house and all his tools burnt down. It's heartbreaking to see that the same has happened to How To Make Everything and I hope he doesn't burn out too
I think it's certainly part of the discussion. The truth is that these 'big' creative channels often pale in comparison to the channels getting the big views. In their categories they're probably amongst the best, but YouTube also has thousands of videos every day of really lowest common denominator content that gets a much wider audience.
So what people are asking for I think is a way to make sure these niche channels are still viable, so that they don't get overwhelmed and ousted by the waterfall of wider audience content that gets the majority of the views. That may not make financial sense for YouTube, and I suspect there's room for a new platform that focuses on higher quality content creators.
I was saddened to see that he stopped producing videos after this. This is exemplary of a serious social problem we seem to have.
I feel for him personally, because I've had a similar personal "ultimatum" regarding online interaction:
I don't comment and don't contribute at all any more because the emotional load of what you receive in return just... Isn't worth it.
So much nasty, pointless noise. I was taught as a kid to "Say nothing at all, if you have nothing nice to say". Now I'm sticking to it, and some.
It's sad for sure, as this represents a macro-level chilling effect on social interaction.
I don't want to be "that Evan guy" in the comments trolling, and I don't want to risk receiving the noise of trolls. So I just opted out.
These days, I just passively consume things online, observing the waves of rage and bigotry, and letting them flow by, knowing I have no stake in their game.
Things are much better in real life, where I have great conversations with friends, family, and coworkers. We can get in to deep conversations and negativity isn't taken personally like that. Because the bandwidth is higher between participants and we care about each other.
The only remaining way I contribute, is to create one-off accounts, say what I think if it's nice, and never look at it again. I don't want to see the responses, because they just lure you in to wanting to respond, and they end up wasting emotional space in my mind.
I think that a lot of society has changed for the worse given the freedom and aggressive adoption of tech companies "disrupting." (What I mean is: They're given the ability to try to aggressively make money at all costs and force their will. Consequences on people, rights, laws be damned.)
Youtube has no interest in curating great content by creators. They just want to keep that money printer going and keeping people on the site. There was a comment somewhere about the views that someone gets.. honest, good, and educational content doesn't get rewarded as much as a person doing pranks that harm people.
I explained once that I think social media as-is must perish. A more humane business model should rise from the ashes. Responses boiled down to shrugs stating Twitter reflects society and we can't escape it.
Cody's Lab did a video series on making yellow cake uranium that got him a visit from g men. Most everything Colin Furze does has mortal danger. Styropyro is probably also on a watchlist. Williams project was dangerous, but I don't see a reason why he should be a pariah.
You can add: photonicinduction. Everybody looks crazy until they're next to this dude. The dimensions involved scare me, and his "goes to 11 is not enough" attitude makes it even worse.
Well, they’d probably need to make a law banning it - and who seriously believes anyone is going to do that anyway enough to pass a law about it? (Lol)
Also, even relatively nanny state UK probably figures if he’s only going to take himself out, why bother trying to stop him.
I also quite enjoy Edwin Sarkissian's "shoot at large/heavy/explosive stuff with very high caliber out in the desert" videos, although it's quite a bit safer than the stuff already mentioned upthread due to his simply being sufficiently far away from the impact/explosion.
Fascinating in the same way as the classic/famous Hydraulic Press Channel.
Colin Furze's videos are much worse in the way he shows not using safety gear. At least an X-Ray tube is hard to come by, hard to use and people generally know it's dangerous.
Colin Furze is basically a first world mining operation compared to the "look at how they do <insert thing here> in <insert equatorial country here>" type videos that nobody takes any issue with.
Of Course we should set a good example when it comes to working with dangerous things in our youtube videos. We should use PPE at all times and give clear warnings about the risks throughout the video…
… But Maybe if you’re too stupid to realise that a safety tie isn’t actually protective, then maybe your upcoming appointment with evolution is overdue.
Alternate option - stemming from the OP comment - if we want to get children involved in engineering and science fields, and this kind of cool shit science is how we can easily do it, they absolutely have to assume a portion of their audience won't know what is real and what isn't.
In other words, not everyone is you. Always remember that.
I don’t know what energies you need for medical imaging, but a keV linear electron accelerator is commonly called “a CRT”, and it’s already powerful enough to screw you up if you really try.
(Of course, the power supply, the flyback converter, and all the other stuff you get at immediately upon opening the case are plenty dangerous even without all the effort it takes to get ionizing radiation out of the tube.)
I believe (though my memory is foggy, so don't quote me on this) Styropyro was approached by some military/DARPA projects with an employment offer, but he reportedly turned it down.
From memory I believe the reason he got the visit was because he made a joke about creating a fusion reactor - something like "until I get my fusion reactor running I'll need to use the sun"
In contrast, I appreciate that ElectroBOOM carefully scripts every seemingly accidental fire or spark to ensure he's safe. He has had only one instant where he screwed up and survived through luck.
You're right. A parent giving children access to all of the physical equipment to make this, and leaving them so unsupervised that they can do it is fine. The bad thing is making a video of you doing it, in case people pretend you're promoting it.
This is why I will never let my children read a car manual. What if they build a car and run someone over?
It's frighteningly easy for children to get their hands on materials like arsenic and thallium. All they need is a credit card and a YouTube tutorial helpfully walking them through the dosage.
I used to share your perspective. Then I ended up with a [step]kid whose only interests in medicine and engineering keep me awake at night.
I get where you're coming from. I knew a kid who was really into making explosives, he ended up blowing himself up one night after cooking up a batch of TATP. Pretty tragic story, he was a bright kid. As I remember, I think he had a single mom who couldn't quite be there for him.
I think the best way of dealing with that sort of situation is to find them a mentor or role model that can show them how it's actually done and turn the interest into something that can be explored safely. I think if my friend had actually known real chemists that could mentor him and that he could talk to about his projects, there's a chance he might have been alive today.
There are things that have an element of danger, and then there are things that are reckless bordering on suicidal. Any real world chemist would probably just stare at you in disbelief if you told them you wanted to make TATP in your bedroom. That isn't just dangerous, it's moronic, beyond reckless.
This stuff is highly explosive and notoriously difficult to handle because of its volatility and propensity for spontaneous detonation. You don't know that if you're 15 and getting all your advice from the Internet, though. You may even hear a nickname like "mother of satan" and think it sounds pretty cool. Turns out chemists usually give substances nicknames like that for a reason.
I think what's the most dangerous is kids experimenting alone without any experience based advice from some dodgy internet forum.
Ok, but my point remains. The fact it has a bad reputation for blowing people up among people who have a bad reputation for blowing people up is pretty telling.
There is at least one vendor selling a sample of thallium in an acrylic cube as a collector's item. Unclear how much is actually present, but any perceptible amount would be pretty dangerous if removed from its enclosure.
Yah, no shortage of suppliers for thallium, I was just surprised you could find it on Amazon since its not really used for any consumer product I was aware of
The idea of children having access to a credit card strikes me as dangerous and irresponsible for many more reasons than just the odd chance that they use it to buy chemicals online.
If you want to buy something as a child, you use cash or get a parent's permission.
(Preempting the "ok boomer" responses, I'm 22 this year)
It's possible they have access to the credit card without permission. Most people don't keep their credit cards locked up in a gun safe.
Mine could be retrieved right now out of my wallet lying on a tray in my living room. I also don't have children, so I'm not particularly concerned personally. I haven't caught my dogs buying anything online yet.
If your kid can and will do things like steal your credit card, make unauthorized purchases and buy explosives.. the problem is not that William Osman didn't wear PPE.
I remember my own experience with "youtube explosives" as a kid.
I'd watched NurdRage's video [1] on how to extract lithium from a certain type of battery and thought that sounded like fun, so I asked my father to help me get the batteries needed. When he then asked me why I needed this specific type of (not cheap) battery, I showed him [1] and he said "That looks dangerous and fun, let's do it together" (or something to that effect).
One hour and some needle nose pliers later, we're down one battery and a burn hole in our bathroom tiles (as a result of a lithium fire that my father immediately suffocated), but up a bonding experience.
Had I tried to disassemble the battery alone (ignoring for a moment how I'd have gotten my hands on it in the first place without my father's knowledge, perhaps by stealing a credit card or with an Alexa's assistance, as other posters have suggested might happen), I probably would have attempted to extinguish the burning lithium by pouring water on it, which I'm sure would have gone excellently :).
I guess the moral of my story is that it's probably more effective to try to earn your kids' trust and ensure their safety yourself, rather than attempt to child-proof the rest of the world (with the assumption that your children will be going behind your back in their attempts to earn Darwin awards in new and exciting ways).
Stealing your parent's credit card strikes me as the more pressing issue here, rather than a youtube video that shows you how to do something dangerous.
Where and when don't we allow children to wander around the city by themselves?
In many large cities, kids are expected to use public transit to get to/from school. It's not unknown for parents to send kids on errands. And, how does the kid get to the park?
This "kids can't go anywhere alone" idea is very new.
My Mom complained that the one route that I never used to go to/from school is the one that she showed me.
It seems to be a recent development in some larger American cities.
I work in a company in Berlin that has job applicants from many different countries, including the US. Common question during the process (we generally require relocation at this point) are:
- "Can my 12yo children go somewhere alone? I'm from Portland/similar and this is not the case here and it's why we're moving."
- "We've been looking and it's really hard to find an apartment in Berlin. We have this ground-floor option, but they just shot the ground-floor windows in across the street here again this morning. Is ground floor safe in Berlin?
I'm no longer surprised when it comes up, but it's quite sad.
That's because they're from Portland. There are only a handful of cities in the US where people do not feel safe to let their kids run around, and Portland is one of them. Even there only certain neighborhoods are unsafe. Your view of America is the same as an American who believes that women can't go outside without being sexually assaulted in Germany because of the 2015-16 New Years attacks, i.e. incredibly out of touch.
YouTube Kids is mostly safe, but there's a small chance kids could see nudity, violence, or just weird stuff, as well as ads for stuff like junk food. Our study found that 27% of videos watched by kids 8 and under are intended for older target audiences, with violence being the most likely negative content type. . . . On the plus side for parents, YouTube offers fair warning that kids may see something that you don't want them to see and you can block and report inappropriate videos.
I checked out all of Alfred Morgan's books from multiple public libraries (a platform accessible by children!!!) in the seventies and early eighties. Probably saw the golden book of chemistry experiments at some point too - it looked very familiar when I got a copy of the pdf as an adult. I think the difficulty of obtaining model T spark coils, chemicals ("ask your druggist") etc kept me out of a lot of trouble.
And nukes! Its been a while since I read "The Radioactive Boy Scout" and after rereading it I'm defintely going to keep my kid close as he goes through TCOR's black powder and other experiments.
The truth is far more bizarre: the Golf Manor Superfund cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn, who attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his mother’s potting shed as part of a Boy Scout merit-badge project.
[...]
David Hahn taught himself to build a neutron gun. He figured out a way to dupe officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into providing him with crucial information he needed in his attempt to build a breeder reactor, and then he obtained and purified radioactive elements such as radium and thorium.
[...]
David’s parents admired his interest in science but were alarmed by the chemical spills and blasts that became a regular event at the Hahn household. After David destroyed his bedroom—the walls were badly pocked, and the carpet was so stained that it had to be ripped out—Ken and Kathy banished his experiments to the basement.
[...]
Kathy then forbade David from experimenting in her home. So he shifted his base of operations to his mother’s potting shed in Golf Manor. Both Patty Hahn and Michael Polasek admired David for the endless hours he spent in his new lab, but neither of them had any idea what he was up to. Sure, they thought it was odd that David often wore a gas mask in the shed and would sometimes discard his clothing after working there until two in the morning, but they chalked it up to their own limited education. Michael says that David tried to explain his experiments but that “what he told me went right over my head.” One thing still sticks out, though. David’s potting-shed project had something to do with creating energy. “He’d say, `One of these days we’re gonna run out of oil.’ He wanted to do something about that.”
Its an amazing story, shows what you can achieve if you put your mind to it!
If someone has excellent knowledge of science and us willing to spend years of effort on a project, normal societal guardrails can't stop them. Whethervfir good or ill
It's strange that doing potentially-dangerous things with technology is frowned upon so much more than doing 'conventionally dangerous' stuff like base jumping, huge tricks on bikes/skateboards/snowboards, free climbing, and so on
Really? It seems to me like folk on YouTube generally get upset over folk doing dangerous things without framing them as such. Folk are upset at Alex Choi over his involvement with the recent Tesla jump that resulted in a crash and damaged property. There was a fair deal of outrage at Trevor Jacob within the aviation community over his apparent fake engine failure video, where he did the wrong thing even if the engine had failed. The Thought Emporium had folk wagging their finger at them when they had a video on a guy trying to modify his own genome so they wouldn't be lactose intolerant.
But folk generally aren't mad with about things the Mythbusters' did, even though they could have been dangerous, because they were presented as dangerous. Folk have gotten into competitions to fill their backyards with the most foam they can -- which can be dangerous. But it's generally presented as that and they talk about the heat generated and such. Those sorts of things are generally presented as entertaining not a way to get around an expensive medical system or good idea.
Is there anyone who doesn't understand that modifying their genome has risks? The bad engine recovery is misinformation, that deserves criticism. But the intersection of people who could copy the xray design and those who don't know xrays cause damage must be vanishingly small right? It feels like some sort of moral outrage.
I think you mean "free solo climbing," not "free climbing." Free climbing means climbing with a rope and belayer but without artificial aid, like etriers or jumars.
Skateboarders don't really create the impression that their sport is that one cheap trick to skip a propper medical X-Ray.
Or phrased differently: there are no people with broken bones and insufficient funds looking at skateboarders and thinking: "I should do that, because I live in a nation without a propper health care system"
Probably conventionally dangerous stunts happen much more often than potentially dangerous engineering stuff. By definition you'll hear more outrage around more densely outrageous things. If more people did dangerous engineering stuff then it would be vice versa.
Also perhaps a dangerous skateboard trick is less likely to harm anyone else but oneself, whereas an engineering disaster can catastrophic at a range
My big hate, is seeing the more common but much more dangerous activities on youtube not being called out for really stupid OH&S issues.
I watch a lot of car stuff on youtube and I wince ever time I see someone use an angle ginder without gloves, or worse the blade shield.
It's a lot more common to go turn on a power tool and rip a finger off than to do a bmx jump, or build a killer robot or some such. There's a degree of normalization of deviance there.
The risk of catastrophic harm for BASE jumping (and I say this as a licensed skydiver who has many friends who are base jumpers) is high enough it’s almost certainly safer taking a machine gun, pointing it straight up, and emptying a couple belts in the air trying to hit yourself in the head.
As a noob, it’s more like putting on a blindfold and wandering across 101 at 8pm for a few minutes.
Skateboarding for noobs is much safer as it’s more on the broken bones side than fatalities.
It's like how stabbing yourself in a random spot on the torso with a knife would be (in my estimation) more frowned upon/antisocial than playing Russian roulette with a six shooter.
Doing stuff with science and technology is dangerous in non-obvious and unintuitive ways, and making experiments safe requires expert knowledge. So, the analogy doesn't hold. I don't know anyone who considers those other things you listed as not dangerous.
> It’s worth noting that William Osman stopped producing videos on his YouTube channel due to the fallout of this video.
Was it really because of that video? My impression from his last video was just people being unnecessarily mean to him for no reason in general, not just because of that video, but maybe I missed something.
Personally, I was super impressed by this video. It was the first time I had seen his videos (or heard of him). It was an instant subscribe for me when I saw it.
I hope he's doing well. He seemed in a really bad place in his final video.
he's okay and currently does a super nice podcast with other youtubers like nilred and the backyard scientist called "safety third". He will release videos sometime soon again - He talked about his backlog with his releases because he wanted to release a video about his mr. beast's squidgame involvement first and didnt find a good angle to tell the story.
I enjoyed his main channel content, but found the first few episodes of the podcast to be a little rough going because they had a strong focus on complaining about the people complaining about their lack of safety measures. (Which just wasn't interesting listening to me.)
Have the more recent episodes moved past that? I'd like to give it another shot.
They have for the most part. It comes up occasionally now, and for the most part they're still as unfocused as normal. They rotate in people all the time which is fine. The last few episodes have been weirdly a lot about Taxes but the Nilegreen episode was interesting.
After watching his X-Ray video, I watched the video where he said he was done with it. The guy needed to stop reading all his comments. Joe Rogan literally has a bit about this exact situation with Youtube comments.
Why is the reaction "stop making videos?" You can serve videos from Cloudflare and sell your own ad placements to pay the paltry fees...with no one hanging over you. These content creators could easily use YouTube to promote their own site and pivot away.
Poor Joe Rogan just can't get a break while singing dangerous praises as though Gospel. He uses his platform irresponsibly, gives voice to crackpots and idiots, and is prone to disseminating misinformation, which makes him remarkably dangerous. Rogan, Hannity and Carlson are only for the weak-minded.
Damn after I found out he made it a habit to say a particular racial slur on the show I figured people were done with this guy. Can't fathom how people think he's defensible (and indeed, not a single downvote has left a defense).
Sorry people you dont agree with can have a voice. Theres no such thing as a "dangerous" opinion. Learn to listen to all sides and let others listen to all sides and then make independent decisions. The way you battle terrible speech is with countering speech, not shutting down conversation to your liking.
You really can't think of a time where powerful people used their platform to spread misinformation or persuade people towards terrible outcomes? And besides, no one is shutting down conversation. They are simply publically denouncing Joe Rogan. Isn't that exactly what you're saying we should be doing, countering speech?
Safety concerns are real and I believe William Osman manages them pretty well.
Here's a "reacts" video where a radiologist agrees he's being pretty safe and what he's doing isn't that risky (assuming he knows what he's doing with high voltage.)
Might I suggest that even on occasions when the Daily Mail (/ Mail Online) has accurate content, they still don't deserve page views or advert impressions and that when not too hard other links would be better. I'm not sure how the exact content stacks up, but this Smithsonian Mag link was high in my search results https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/clarence-dally-the-ma...
Anyway, thanks for the story that I hadn't heard before!
That's an interesting suggestion. May I ask why? I really don't know anything about it.
The hesitation I had with sharing a daily mail link was "Is it accurate?" rather than whether they deserve impressions. It hadn't occurred to me that it might be a bad idea to support them.
They're widely (although not universally) considered to be irredeemable in England after an article they published in 1934 entitled "Hurrah for the Blackshirts".
Wikipedia is probably a good place to learn a handful of examples and go further down the rabbit hole from there if interested, starting with these sections:
7 Libel lawsuits
7.1 Successful lawsuits against the Mail
7.2 Unsuccessful lawsuits
7.3 Legal action by the Daily Mail
Although of course the wikipedia page just has a small number of examples, I'd say that the first words of those 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.6 subheaders above, and lack of 8.7, do a decent job of surmising the Daily Mail.
At the very worst (and it's not even at the worst) you can call this guy stupid for building something like that.
But 69k for an xray? That's where the outrage should be directed. That's evil in it's purest form. More then just simple outrage, the person responsible for charging that 69k bill is someone that needs to go to jail.
The sad thing is, the responsibility is distributed among the entire medical industry. It's very similar to the phenomenon of software engineer salaries.
It's relatively early. Nobody is associating this with software yet. But given the unique salaries in the US (with the epicenter being the bay area) it's quite obvious this is what's going on.
He hosts a podcast channel called Safety Third[1] with a few of his science friends, and has some interesting guests too. I quite enjoy it, check it out.
Yes, I agree it was many factors. This video seemed to be the breaking point, but it was certainly a long time coming. I recall several videos over the past 2 or so years where he drew attention to the invective he receives. I don’t really participate beyond watching the videos, so perhaps there are others who are more informed about the factors behind his decision.
Regardless, I wish him all the best and hope he’ll find a way to showcase his talent or at least find fulfillment elsewhere.
As far as I heard listening to the podcast, I am not convinced he is done making videos. And even if he does end up stopping, they got a pretty great podcast which he seems to enjoy.
They'll come back eventually. Everyone who becomes big on the internet has the problem of not being able to disconnect from it's commenters. It goes against our nature even because real humans don't talk like that.
You eventually learn that these are ignorant people commenting because they don't know any better - and the sea of opinions doesn't matter. Either you let them hold you against your will or you just do what you want. It's a hill anyone has to climb.
That video also resulted in him, Osman, setting up a fake job application interview with one commenter for the sole purpose of filming and posting it online on his YouTube [0]. Which is, in my opinion, very petty and immature. It's good that he stopped making videos for the time being while learning what most creators online have to deal with and don't take to this level.
If you watched the video, I'll have to be the one asking you — why do you think looking up somebody from your comments section, making them sign agreements under a false pretence and setting up an interview, and then making fun of this individual talking about how "embarassing" he is in your videos is not immature? I won't even begin talking about brigading against somebody when you have a vast user base. Content creators have some unwritten responsibilities and such acts are uncommon because they usually do not fall into these things trying to make "a point".
It is irrelevant who said what, only what was said. It is not possible to validly counter an argument by attacking the man, which is why ad hominem is a fallacy. The logical way to have approached this is to ignore the man and point out the argument from authority, also a fallacy.
Getting worked up enough about a random internet comment to go to that length to try to humiliate the person is immature. Especially with a fraudulent job application.
Here, let's try something out: Neatze, I think you're a big ol idiot.
Now, what is your response going to be? Will you just shake your head and move on with your life? Or will you try to e-stalk me, set up a fake job interview for me, just so you can get a one up on me?
Probably not, because I bet you're more mature than the dude in the video.
In a somewhat comical sense, it's pretty "mature" to draw up a contract with someone (a very "professional" thing to do) to prove a point that someone trolling on your video has no idea what they're talking about. How else could he prove the point in any other realistic manner?
Calling something immature when it's a well thought-out and explored topic doesn't seem fair. He's touched on how random internet trolls hurt other YouTubers, not just him, in other videos (to show this isn't some impulsive thing).
If you make tens of thousands of dollars a month on YouTube with AdSense, you are effectively a business. And indeed, many of these YouTubers have setup businesses in their name that receive the AdSense funds, and pay themselves a salary out of that.
A company does not publicly humiliate a customer who makes a detrimental statement to its products - can you imagine the devastation from someone who is socially awkward and receives this kind of backlash for the horrific crime of speaking slightly out of line?
Does your employer have a "worst employee of the month" poster with enumerated examples of all of the fuckups they made in the last month? That would be a million times less harmful than a pop-culture hack doing the same thing to you because you said something out of line.
People should be free to abuse each other online, call each other all sorts of stuff and ESPECIALLY lie or stretch the truth, without facing offline scrutiny or embarrassment.
I disagree with your opinion that people should be free to abuse others online without any scrutiny offline. Especially when people claim to be experts and assert authority on subjects.
Also, what is with creating these fictional scenarios about an employer punishing a customer or employee? Even if “he” were a business, he’s free to react to criticism however he chooses.
My local barber chose to respond to negative reviews by chastising every single one. They still somehow have plenty of happy customers.
> A company does not publicly humiliate a customer who makes a detrimental statement to its products
This happens quite often.
It's very common to find reviews on Yelp where someone leaves a less-than-honest review and the company owner comes in and explains what a piece of shit that person was and how they aren't telling the whole story.
If you come into a store and act like a dick towards the staff, you will almost certainly be publicly humiliated.
It even happens with larger companies where someone goes to the media with some BS story, and then the company issues public statements about how that person is full of shit.
I see nothing wrong with what William did. It may be petty, but who cares. If you don't want to be called out, don't be a troll.
There are three differences between what Osman Unincorporated and the companies that you describe have done.
# Number one is scope:
- They do not have the same amount of readers, evangelists etc. that could harass the person making the erroneous claim
# Number two is positioning:
- Reviews can be, by their very nature, points of discussion, therefore meaning that anything underneath a review, including a comment from the company that makes the product, is a point of discussion and thus necessary to protect in order to have a free and open dialog.
# Number three is punching power:
- William Osman published a fraudulent job application and got someone to sign a contract while promising him that he moving up in the world, only to pull the rug out from underneath him and instead shock him with the fact that he is now going to be harassed due to his uninformed "trolling" (which happens plenty of times from informed professionals even on Hacker News). This kind of bait and switch is mentally devastating, and the person is undoubtedly shocked from such an act of bullying which could be argued to be traumatizing. All of this happened because the guy spoke out of line on a specific technical issue on which both people were wrong.
There's nothing mature about violating contract law. It feels like fraudulent misrepresentation to me. Key aspects of fraudulent misrepresentation[0]:
1) a representation was made
2) the representation was false
3) that when made, the defendant knew that the representation was false or that the defendant made the statement recklessly without knowledge of its truth
4) that the fraudulent misrepresentation was made with the intention that the plaintiff rely on it
5) that the plaintiff did rely on the fraudulent misrepresentation
6) that the plaintiff suffered harm as a result of the fraudulent misrepresentation
I don’t think Will committed fraudulent misrepresentation, if that could even apply or if this somehow caused harm. Either way, who said violating contract law was immature? Only you. Why suggest I did? What motive do you have here?
Thanks for that video. I now have MASSIVE respect for this dude. I don't think it's immature at all. It was a very fun way to call out this piece of shit of a person.
Tangentially, I believe Josiah Zayner's YT channel got pulled when they found out he was documenting a DIY COVID-19 vaccine along with 2 or 3 fellow biohackers in 2020.
I was one of the commenters criticizing him, though I did not post anything until his dismissive response video.
I made no personal attacks, but highlighted how dangerous it is to the audience to present 10+ kV supplies as no-big-deal toys. Everyone can acquire an HV supply and play with it. Many of them even should, but certainly not because of a video demonstrating ways to kill yourself with absolute no risk assessment.
This line of thinking is quite confusing to me. The amount of neglected children lucky enough to participate, unsupervised, in an experiment like this is certainly dramatically less than the amount you could save by hiring more social workers. With respect to supervision, why is responsibility being shifted away from parents? Blaming a YouTube video for your child's chronic exposure to X-rays is a poor excuse for not paying attention to you kid. Not to mention, the proliferation of this type of video would automatically expose the inherent danger as the safety-adverse content providers reveal the consequences.
I am not talking about children. Children do whatever the hell they want.
I'm talking about adults who see some guy playing with HV with no safety systems, causing arcs that could have easily killed him, and vehemently defending this behavior. Adults can trivially acquire HV supplies. If they listened to this guy and never stopped to research things further they'd be dropping like flies.
It was a long time coming because he comes off as very aloof and has received criticism about the safety of many other projects, but this one appears to have triggered a lot of outrage.
FWIW, I think we need more young, brilliant minds sharing this kind of content. It has the entertainment value needed to capture the interest of young viewers who may not be otherwise interested in engineering disciplines. There are many, many other channels out there (backyard scientist, action lab, Cody’s lab, stuff made here, etc.) who are very successful on YouTube, but they tend to cater to viewers who are deliberately choosing to watch their videos.