Please join with me in an effort to clean up YouTube a little bit

[Essohbe]

but since these videos don't seem to be disappearing at all, I am wondering if

anything is or can be done.

 

I joined recently, I just saw this thread. I know what you mean, I've flagged quite a bit of videos I've found but they seem to still be up there. I think all YouTube does is puts an age limit on viewing them so you'd have to log in to see them. That does absolutely no good since a five year old can make an account and say he's 50, then watch anything he wants.

 

I think some vids that show what can happen need to stay though.

 

 

http://www.youtube.c...5l639l0.1.2l3l0

 

 

Edit>> Links should work now.

Edited January 26, 2012 by Essohbe

[PersonGuyDude]

Double Plus Ungood indeed.

 

You know, in the future, we will not have the ability to even have this conversation. Crimethink will become impossible to think, let alone speak.

[Potassiumchlorate]

They will implant microchips in the brains of newborns, so that double plus bad thoughts will be erased in the same moment they appear.

[warthog]

They will implant microchips in the brains of newborns, so that double plus bad thoughts will be erased in the same moment they appear.

 

That would properly be said as, "Double Plus Ungood thoughts will be immediately unthought in the same moment they appear."

 

Remember, there are no really negative words, only Unpositive ones in the Orwellian world of 1984.

========

 

I also must retract my earlier assertion that none of these vids are disappearing., I went back through the thread and a number of them ARE in fact being removed so perhaps this is doing some good after all. The ones that truly make me sad are the ones with teens or younger telling their peers how to obtain what they need to make this stuff illegally. I report those all the time to no avail and I cannot understand how this doesn't violate YT policy. Not only are they too young to be doing what they are doing w/o parental supervision evident but the tell the world how to do what they are doing as well. Furthermore they rarely use proper safety measures, like the kid making BP in a mortar & pestle...pistol...pasta..prestle or whatever it is called as he repeats over and again. He is making an explosive mixture next to a gas stove (pilot lights?), the he light a bit of it, which throws sparks all over some of which nearly land in his container of newly made BP!

 

Not only do I find this objectionable but where are the police who should have this youngster under wraps or why is it even still up considering how many folks reported it including myself a while back. There are other showing what are plainly teens, maybe younger even, lighting 200+ gram 7/3 Flash bombs, face in frame and all and when I reported some of those I was actually warned that if I continued to report videos that were not in fact violations (a link to their policy provided that plainly showed these were in fact violations), my account would be deleted and I would no longer be welcome on YT.

 

All I can say is this, one day now that SOPA/PIPA is here, YT will find themselves with an FBI SWAT TEAM in all of their offices and server suites around the world with a lot to answer to and records of folks like us trying to report this stuff to them and them trying to intimidate us into leaving well enough alone. Good.

[NightHawkInLight]

YouTube usually does an excellent job of monitoring flagged videos, and more often than not will only remove the ones that were flagged for legitimate reasons. Sometimes it takes a few days. Not bad for a site with hundreds of millions of videos to monitor.

 

As to your comments regarding where the police are in all of this, I am very glad they have not shown their faces. Every young kid with a healthy interest in the world is going to do dangerous things. It is up to their parents to monitor that activity and put up boundaries when needed, not the police. The good intention of the government setting those reasonable boundaries so parents don't have the option to is much of what gets us deeper and deeper into this regulatory and societal mess that I have no appropriate words for.

 

When someone starts to endanger or intend harm to other people directly through their actions, that is the only time the police should be involved, and feel free to report such activity if you see it. Even the videos of kids making black powder in dangerous ways I do not believe the police should in any way become involved in. If it is dangerous and might trick someone else into following the process, the video can be flagged, but the individual who uploaded it should be informed of the danger, not reported to the police. The police should absolutely never even have the authority to have a dangerous video removed from a website. Even if the process is the most obviously dangerous and irresponsible thing to ever be viewed by human eyes, if the police are given authority to remove the content, they then have grounds to remove whatever else is deemed in their eyes to be dangerous. That would very likely include this, and every other pyro website out there. There is no one man, and I would go so far as to say not even a collective of hundreds of individuals that combined could justly determine what should and should not be available information.

 

I am becoming more and more of the belief that even dangerous and incorrect instructions should not be removed from the web, but that they should be buried under, and exposed as faulty by the massive amount of correct information and teaching that is provided by those who actually know what they're doing. Free speech is too important to chip away at with good intentions.

 

A kid can cause himself ten fold more injury and property damage with a half empty can of gasoline in the garage than is likely to be caused by five grams of poorly made black powder anyway. You'll never stop kids from doing dangerous things by removing a video, you can only stop your own kids from watching such videos, and teach them correctly.

[warthog]

I M ll for no regulation actually. I am a firm believer in the open market, government only gums that up.

 

when kids video each other deface\ing public property, like tombstones, I do think the police should be called in, that or if it turns out to be my relative and if I ID the kids, I should be able to,deface them.

[Mumbles]

I'd be a blatant hypocrite if I was reporting individuals under the age of 18 for making fireworks or doing home chemistry. I got my start well before I was of the legal age of majority, as did many other currently well respected pyros. Steve LaDuke will happily relate many stories of him doing dumb stuff in his childhood and teens. We all have these stories whether or not they're related to pyro. It builds character and interesting people. Many members of this forum are undoubtedly under 18 as well. I wont restrict their access or participation here. I will however do my best to ensure they're practicing the hobby in a responsible, intelligent, and safe manner. This goes for all members regardless of age actually.

 

There is a drastic decline among the younger generations in their interest in the sciences. I tie this in with pyro as well. Go to a PGI convention or any club shoot and the median age is probably well over 40 or 50. There is more than one reason for this of course. There was an excellent article in Wired magazine a few years ago on the state of the sciences. Several prominent Nobel laureates were interviewed and all said that their interest in science got started and developed outside of school. With the demise of real high school labs containing real chemicals, electricity, dissection of animals, open flame, etc. many students do not get exposed to science until it's often too late. They come into college with a pre-concieved notion of what they want to do, and rarely get the chance to be exposed to real science. General chemistry and physics labs are having to be dumbed down accordingly. I taught general chemistry at one of the nations top undergraduate programs this last fall. 20% of my class had never had any chemistry before, and many more than that were unaware of very basic lab skills that I feel should have easily been learned in high school.

 

If you want people to excel at anything, it's best to get them started at a young age when their minds are at their most versatile. I feel the same way about pyrotechnics as I do about chemistry. That said, I am not okay with minors engaging in the hobby without parental knowledge. Ideally they'd have some parental support and consent as well. It does however bug me when inexperienced individuals are giving advice like they are some sort of authority figure, and then thinking they know everything there is about pyro. People far to inexperienced to know better take it as gospel, and you get all sorts of crap information engrained as truth to a lot of people. Being the king among the idiots doesn't mean you're not an idiot yourself. I see it all the time here, where someone says something, references a youtube video contain poor information, and wonders why their chemistry reaction or stars are not working. Youtube is not the place people should be learning the hobby from IMO.

[Potassiumchlorate]

As to your comments regarding where the police are in all of this, I am very glad they have not shown their faces. Every young kid with a healthy interest in the world is going to do dangerous things. It is up to their parents to monitor that activity and put up boundaries when needed, not the police. The good intention of the government setting those reasonable boundaries so parents don't have the option to is much of what gets us deeper and deeper into this regulatory and societal mess that I have no appropriate words for.

 

Totally agree. Youngsters,especially boys and young men, often do dangerous things, sometimes life-threatening. However, I consider a young man who never did anything risky quite an abnorm fellow.

 

And nothing good will come out of fascist methods, not even if the intentions are good.

[warthog]

I would agree with you all but for one thing, our parents were involved with our childhoods. At least this is my guess for those of us 40+. Unfortunately the majority of youngsters today do not have parental supervision of any merit so they run wild and do things that I am not so sure I did at the same age. I am sure I did many of the same things but I did them later in life, relatively, when I was at least slightly better equipped to understand what it was I was doing. As for any of this sparking interest in the sciences, I have my doubts. I do lament the decline of the American Student where Math & Science is concerned, we once turned out the very best people in those fields but that was back when I was in school. Not today, today we are way behind and again this is due to a lack of parental involvement with their children. Those of you who are parents, please don't take this as saying all of today's parents lack the ability to parent. This is not what I am saying at all. There are still a lot of great parents but they are now a minority rather than the majority that the once had been.

 

Look at the forum, how many folks here can actually express themselves in proper sentences and proper grammar? Even with a spell checker way too many of us are simply unable to spell (typos not counted). People use words like "To" and "Two" and "Too" either improperly or they use the same one for all purposes. I read people saying things like "This is a mute point" rather than a moot point and it makes me want to cry. That is jut one example too, many of this type of phrase has gotten perverted or become misused or the wrong word is used in them that the dictionaries are now changing to the popular usage rather than having the people try to learn the right way to say it or use it. Sure this is a living language that is always changing but the changes are coming fast and furious these days and this is because people have grown too darn lazy to figure out the right way to say something.

 

I can even tell you when this decline began but no one here will like the answer. When we threw God under the bus, out of the schools and out of our lives in general, our society as a whole suffered terribly. All one needs do is take a look at statistics and compare this to when we started treating God as a non-PC topic and by this I mean the Christian God. All other gods are still welcome and actively taught. We lost our moral grounding when we lost God.

 

Anyway, the police remark was an offhand thing and that was all it was, no more than that. It was more meant to show that we are willing to allow our children to run wild and be dumb enough to provide video proof that they are committing crimes. I'd by lying too if I said I never broke any laws, in fact I have broken a lot of them and done some seriously improper things along the way. You won;t find any proof of it nor will you see a picture of me doing them or anything else like that. You may credit this to the fact that videoing was not that easy to do when I was young but I don't. I wasn't dumb enough to gibe the cops the evidence they needed to arrest me, which is why my record is spotless save for traffic violations. Now that I think of it, I DO think that if the cops can ID the people and the place where the crimes are being committed on YouTube, why shouldn't they arrest the culprits for it?

 

Sorry for the thread destruction. It was a good one and I wish now I had kept out of it since now it will be unlikely to ever go back to what it was doing.

Edited January 27, 2012 by warthog

[optimus]

I am becoming more and more of the belief that even dangerous and incorrect instructions should not be removed from the web, but that they should be buried under, and exposed as faulty by the massive amount of correct information and teaching that is provided by those who actually know what they're doing. Free speech is too important to chip away at with good intentions.

 

I agree. No amount of reporting or unplugging server racks is going to rid the web of this kind of stuff anyway. Unless you unplug them all and replace the web with a single government-approved site.

[warthog]

which government?