It's not strict censorship per say, but more repression, but there are a lot of oddball youtube channels that are very popular that constantly get demonetized based on a somewhat arbitrary definitions of what is and isn't appropriate.
This is important, because a lot of these people are trying to make their livings creating videos on youtube, and start trying to avoid otherwise interesting topics so they don't get demonitized.
Some examples: StyroPyro (almost got banned for going replicating stuff from a turn of the century chemistry book), Cody's Lab, William Osman, the list goes on and on and on.
https://twitter.com/crabsandscience/status/10421364471872798... https://www.tubefilter.com/2017/11/06/codys-lab-content-stri... https://www.patreon.com/posts/sad-day-for-my-15167435
It seems the problem here isn't Youtube, though -- it's the ad networks.
As great and beneficial as shifting to a p2p distribution model outside of Google is, I'm not sure how it defeats this "censorship", as you go from "Advertisers don't want to pay for ad placements on x/y/z controversial topic and Google won't promote me!" to simply having no revenue model and no promotion.
You would need to start finding third party sponsors and ad networks, and some sort of promotion/content discovery platform, where I suspect you'd run into the same problems -- the people with the money (ad networks) aren't going to want to sponsor certain kinds of content.
I suspect the best way "around" this is to find sponsors and leverage models like Patreon and paypal donations to finance "untouchable" content. I think it encourages better content than adsense financed videos on top of that.
> It seems the problem here isn't Youtube, though -- it's the ad networks.
> As great and beneficial as shifting to a p2p distribution model outside of Google is, I'm not sure how it defeats this "censorship", as you go from "Advertisers don't want to pay for ad placements on x/y/z controversial topic and Google won't promote me!" to simply having no revenue model and no promotion.
I don’t think the problem commented on above is just demonetization and shadowbanning, it’s completely removing comments and channels as well.
But I agree re: sponsors and donations, Peertube already has a “Support” button right next to the like and dislike thumbs, that can be clicked to show donation links, including to Liberapay, and crypto addresses.
Actually looking back at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24857606 I realize the problem commented on there definitely was about demonetization and shadowbanning. Sorry.